What to Check Before You Publish AI Content

The five minutes that save you

Everything up to here has been about producing more. This lesson is the counterweight, and it is the one that keeps you employed. AI writes confidently whether or not it is right, and confident wrong copy published under your brand name is your problem, not the model's.

The good news is that this is a checklist, not a talent. Five passes, most of them quick, and you never have to write the apology post.

In plain English

Hallucination:: When AI states something invented as though it were fact. It sounds exactly like the true parts.
Substantiation:: The evidence you would produce if someone challenged a claim you made in public.
Comparative claim:: Any statement that your product is better, faster or cheaper than a named or implied competitor.
Right of publicity:: A person's right to control commercial use of their face, name or voice.

Pass one: claims you cannot support

Read the draft and mark every sentence that asserts something about the world. Not opinions, assertions. Faster, cheaper, the only, trusted by, proven to, reduces waiting time. For each one, ask whether you could produce evidence within an hour if a regulator or an angry competitor asked.

If the answer is no, the sentence does not go out. Not softened, not hedged with a maybe. Cut or replaced with something true.

Prompt you can copy: the claims audit

Go through this draft sentence by sentence.
List every statement that asserts a fact about the world, our product,
our customers or our competitors. For each one, write:

the sentence, quoted
what evidence would be needed to support it
whether that evidence appears anywhere in the material I gave you
Do not fix anything yet. Do not reassure me. Include statements that seem
obviously true, because those are the ones I stop noticing.
DRAFT:
[paste it]

Checkpoint

Every factual assertion needs evidence you could produce within the hour. If you cannot, cut it rather than softening it.

Pass two: invented numbers

Statistics are where AI is most fluent and least trustworthy. It will give you a percentage, a study, a year and a plausible institution, and any of those can be assembled rather than recalled. Studies get merged. Real figures get attached to the wrong year. Sources that do not exist get cited in perfect academic format.

Asking the AI to check its own statistics does not work. It will often confirm the invented figure with the same confidence it invented it. Every number must be traced to a source you can open in a browser, or it does not get published.

The safe habit is simple: no statistic enters a draft unless you already have the source. Bring your own numbers in, rather than asking for numbers to be found. If you do want research help, ask for the source first and the figure second, then go and open the source yourself.

Pass three: comparative claims

Saying you are better than a named competitor is legal in most places and also the fastest route to a letter from their lawyers. The risk is not in having an opinion, it is in stating a measurable comparison you have not measured.

Faster than the leading alternative is a factual claim. So is more affordable than most agencies. AI produces these constantly because they read as normal marketing rhythm. Treat any sentence containing than as a flag, and either back it with your own data or rewrite it as a statement about you rather than about them.

This is general guidance and not legal advice. If a comparison is central to your campaign and money is riding on it, that is a conversation with an actual lawyer.

❌ Weak prompt

Prompt

Check this blog post for errors.

Output

This is well written and engaging. I found a couple of small typos and the flow is good. The tone works well for your audience.

You asked a vague question and got flattery. Nothing was checked. It read the piece for polish, not for risk.

✅ Good prompt

Prompt

Act as a hostile reader. List every claim in this post I could not defend if challenged, every number without a source, and every comparison to a competitor. Quote each one. Do not comment on style.

Output

Three unsourced figures quoted with locations, one implied comparison to a named competitor, and two claims about customer outcomes with no evidence in the supplied material.

Narrow, adversarial and specific. Hostile reader is the framing that gets you a real audit instead of encouragement.

Pass four: images and copyright

Generated images carry risks that generated text does not, and they are easy to miss because the picture simply looks fine.

Check for logos and trademarks that have crept into the background. Check for faces that resemble a real identifiable person, which is a right of publicity issue rather than a copyright one. Be wary of prompting in the style of a named living artist for commercial work. Check the terms of the specific tool you used, because commercial rights vary by tool and by plan and change more often than you would like. And check the image is not quietly misrepresenting your product, because a photorealistic version of something you do not actually sell is a claim.

Prompt you can copy: the image risk check

I am about to use this generated image in a paid advert for [product].
Describe everything visible in it, including background detail, text,
signage and any objects a viewer could identify as a real brand.
Then flag anything that could be:

a recognisable logo or trademark
a face resembling a real identifiable person
a scene implying something my product does not actually do
text that is garbled or misspelled
Describe what you see. Do not reassure me that it looks fine.

Pass five: the tone that would embarrass you

Last, read it as the least charitable person who might see it. Does the jokey line survive being screenshotted without context? Does the confident line read as arrogant next to bad news in the same feed? Would you be comfortable if a customer who just had a poor experience read this today?

Prompt you can copy: the embarrassment pass

Read this as three different people and tell me what each one notices:

A customer who just had a bad experience with us.
A competitor looking for something to screenshot.
Someone from a different country or culture than the one it was written in.
For each, quote any line that would land badly and explain why in one sentence.
If nothing lands badly, say so plainly rather than inventing a problem.

Five passes. Ten minutes on a short piece. Do them in order, because there is no point polishing the tone of a sentence you are about to cut for being untrue.

Keep the passes as a saved note and paste them one at a time. Bundling all five into one prompt gets you a shallow answer to each. Separate prompts get you five real audits.

📝 Quiz

Question 1 of 4

Your draft cites a statistic with a year and an institution. What should you do?