He was preparing a film about an old quarter, so he asked the assistant about the area's history. Back came a tidy, handsome answer: the year it was founded, the name of the governor who built it, and a figure for its population a century ago. The text was convincing enough that he did not doubt it.
He said the paragraph in the video as it was. Two days later a comment arrived with a link to an archive: the governor named had never ruled that region, and the figure appears in no source at all.
He apologised and took the video down. And his mistake was not using the tool, but using it in the wrong place.
The problem is not that the tool lies
The tool neither lies nor tells the truth; it produces text that resembles correct answers. Which makes the problem subtler than lying: the confidence in its tone never varies. A sentence it knows and a sentence it invented come out with the same calm, and nothing in the text tells you which of the two rests on anything.
And this compounds with names, dates, figures, legal rules and quotations, because those are either right or wrong with no middle ground.
Ask for the route, not the answer
That one sentence solves half the subject. An assistant is excellent at telling you where to look, and weak at being the source itself.
So instead of asking "when was this quarter built and by whom?", ask: "which bodies and archives document the history of this area? What terms should I search with? What questions should I be asking?"
The first answer gives you a paragraph that may be wrong. The second gives you a map that leads you to a documented fact with your own hands.
Three research jobs an assistant is good at
1. Expanding your vocabulary. You know your subject by one word, and the sources call it by five others. Ask for a list of names, specialist terms and field labels, and it will open search results you were not reaching.
2. Generating questions. "What questions should I ask somebody who works in this trade?" is an excellent use, because a question does not need to be correct, it needs to be useful.
3. Organising material you gathered. Give it material you collected from its sources and ask it to order, summarise, or find the contradictions between them. Here it works on material whose provenance you know, so the risk is very small.
The job it is not good at: being the authority on a specific fact.
The rule of the source you open yourself
Write this rule down and pin it up: do not state a figure, a name, a date or a legal rule in your video unless you have personally opened a source that confirms it.
It is not enough for the assistant to cite the source, because links and titles themselves can be fabricated. Open the source, read the passage, and confirm it says what was attributed to it.
The layers of sources, how to rank them by trust, and the checks you run on any number are all set out in research before writing: gathering your material and verifying it. Using an assistant does not change those layers; it only speeds up reaching them.
How to phrase the request
Practical forms you can copy:
I am researching [subject] for a documentary.
Do not give me facts or figures.
Give me:
1. The terminology used in this field, in Arabic and English
2. The kinds of bodies that document this subject
3. Ten questions I should be able to answer before I write
4. What people usually get wrong about this subject
And a second form, for material you gathered yourself:
These are extracts from three sources I collected myself. Do not add
information of your own.
Tell me where these sources agree, where they contradict each other, and what
none of them answers.
The line "do not add information of your own" changes the behaviour of the answer in a real way, so make it a habit.
Ask for "I don't know" explicitly
Add a line to your request: "if you do not hold the information confidently, say you do not know and do not guess." It will not solve the whole problem, but it reduces fabricated answers and gives you a signal you can act on.
And if an answer comes back with precise detail about something rare or very local, treat that as a red flag rather than a success.
Arabic specifically
On local Arabic subjects the problem grows for two reasons: there is less written and documented material, and a good deal of what is online is copied from itself with no original source.
So on any local Arabic subject, treat the tool's answer as a hypothesis rather than a fact. The sources that settle these questions are usually not online at all: a local archive, a book, or a person who knows the place. And that person is the same one who saves you a week on the trip.
Three quick checks on any fact
Before you put any fact in the script:
- Who said it first? Look for the earliest place it appears, not the place that repeats it most.
- Does a second independent source say it? Repetition across ten sites copying each other is not confirmation.
- Would it hold if someone asked about it in a comment? If your answer would be "I read it somewhere", delete it.
A source log: one column that saves you
Add a column beside every fact in your script file with the source link and the date you read it. It costs seconds and solves two things: you can answer any comment in a minute, and you discover the facts with no source yourself before the video goes out.
And if your assistant is connected directly to your project, that log becomes part of the file rather than a separate note, which is one of the benefits of a direct connection set out in what is MCP and how to connect AI tools to your project.
What never to delegate
- Facts, figures, dates and names.
- Quotations attributed to people.
- Legal and medical rules.
- The judgement of what deserves to be in your film.
- The wording of your own opinion.
And where AI helps across the rest of the work and where it ruins it is the subject of where AI helps in video making and where it ruins it.
In short
The tool speeds up your research and does not replace it. Let it point you at the doors, then open the doors yourself. And the difference between someone who uses it well and someone it damages is not the tool, but one question the first asks before every fact: where did this come from?