Verify five claims rather than trusting a smooth AI summary. Follow Carla's demonstration, pause to make your own attempt, and compare your check with the result.
Your activity / Right here
Bring a notebook. Begin below.
The activity is included on this page. Work on paper or in your own document; keep your first attempt and the evidence you checked.
AI Lab: Five Facts, Five Checks
Use only an AI tool your instructor approves and that allows users your age. Check its minimum age and parent-permission rules first; an adult's permission cannot override an 18+ limit. Follow your school's rules, and do not share personal information. About 25 minutes.
1. Use Carla's Five Steps to ask an AI for five facts about AI history, each with a date and a source.
2. Copy the facts into a table like this one:
| # | The AI's fact | Date the AI gave | Source I opened | Correct, partly correct, or wrong? | What the source actually says |
|---|
| 1 | | | | | |
3. Open a real source for each fact: the original paper, an official prize or company page, a museum or university page, or a major news outlet. A search result snippet does not count.
4. Score the AI. How many of its five facts were fully correct? How many of its sources could you actually find?
5. Verify: For every fact that is wrong or only partly right, write the corrected version with its source. Add only verified facts to your sourced AI timeline, your portfolio piece for this chapter.
6. Record your AI use: which tool you used, what you asked, and what you kept.
Own It
No AI. About 10 minutes.
Redraw your timeline by hand, using only facts you verified. Then finish this sentence:
"The fact I almost believed was __________, and I caught it by __________."
Context File Upgrade
Add this section to my_context.md. You can write it on paper first.
## What I Believe About AI So Far
- One thing AI is good at:
- One thing I do not trust AI with yet:
- One worry I have about AI, and the evidence I would need to check it:
- One question about AI I still have:
Keep it short and true to what you think today. Do not include personal information. You will look back at these beliefs at the end of the course.
Skeptic's Corner: Sort the Timeline
These statements are exercises to classify and check. Do not assume every statement is true.
Label each statement: Fact, Idea, Rob's Story, Made-Up Example, Rule, or Prediction.
1. "Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in their 1997 rematch."
2. Turing, in 1950: by the end of the century, people would speak of machines thinking without being contradicted.
3. "Mike wrote a fake Nobel fact on his poster."
4. "Covered platforms must remove nonconsensual intimate images within 48 hours of a valid request."
5. "Knowing the history of AI hype helps you judge today's headlines."
6. "By 2035, AI will do every job better than people." (A claim you might see online.)
Read the video transcript
Read along, pause, or return to an idea. This transcript follows the selected lesson video.
I'm Carla, an AI avatar.
AI is great at giving you facts.
It is also great at giving you wrong facts in a very
confident voice.
Today I'll show you how to turn an AI's list into facts
you can actually use.
I call it the Five-Fact Audit.
Why bother?
Because chatbots can blend true pieces into a false fact.
Mike learned that the hard way, with a Nobel Prize fact
that sounded perfect and was wrong.
I use Dr. Q's Five Steps.
Step one, role: "You are a careful history tutor.
Do not do anything yet."
Step two, objective: "I'm building a timeline of AI
history for class.
Every fact needs a date and a source I can open."
Step three, context: "I'm a high school student.
My teacher accepts original papers,
official prize and company pages,
museum and university pages, and major news outlets."
Step four, task instructions: "Give me five facts about AI
history from 1950 to 2024.
For each one, give the exact date,
one sentence, and a source I can check.
If you're not sure of a detail, say so instead of guessing."
Here are my five facts.
Clean dates.
Confident sentences.
A source for every one.
It looks finished, and that is exactly when I slow down.
Step five, audit.
I make a table with four columns:
the AI's fact, the source I opened,
whether they match, and the fix.
One tip before I start.
The best source is usually the original:
the paper itself, the prize committee's page,
or the company's own announcement.
A search result snippet does not count.
Fact one says Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.
I open IBM's own history page.
May 1997, New York, and Deep Blue won the rematch three
and a half to two and a half.
Match.
Fact two says ChatGPT came out in December 2022.
OpenAI's own announcement is dated November 30, 2022.
Close is still wrong on a timeline,
so I fix it and write down the source.
Fact three names a book as its source.
I search the library catalog and the publisher's website.
I can't find that book anywhere.
A source I can't find is not a source,
so that fact stays off my timeline until I find a real one.
When a source is missing, do not ask the AI to invent a better one.
Ask it where the fact came from,
then go look for yourself.
Facts four and five check out.
The 2024 Physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey
Hinton, and the back-propagation paper appeared in Nature
on October 9, 1986.
Final score: three facts right the first time,
one fixed, and one removed.
If I had copied the list straight onto a poster,
two of my five facts would have been wrong.
Notice what the AI did well: it gave me good leads, fast.
Notice what it could not do: prove anything.
Proof lives in the sources.
Here is the lesson.
The AI gave me five leads.
The sources gave me my facts.
Last step, I record my AI use: which tool,
what I asked, and what I kept.
That note keeps me honest with myself and with my teacher.
Then I add only the verified facts to my timeline,
each with its source written underneath,
so I can walk anyone through exactly where I got it.
Your turn.
Open the AI Lab, Five Facts, Five Checks.
And remember Mike's poster: check it before you write it in marker.
Before you use an AI tool
Follow your course or institution's rules. Use an instructor-approved tool that permits your age, and meet any required consent conditions. Keep names, contact details, school records, and other private information out of prompts. Use fictional examples when you can.
Learning without an AI account
Follow the demonstration, pause before each answer, and do the reasoning on paper. Discuss what you would ask, how you would check it, and which decisions would remain yours.
About the characters and voices
This course uses AI-created characters and synthetic voices. Carla is an AI avatar. They help tell the story; they are not real students sharing testimonials.
Designed for high-school and community-college learners. Choose examples from your classes, work, and everyday life. Keep your completed work in your course portfolio.
