AI Fact-Checker Audit: 1 in 18 Citations Were Fabricated

jonathancheckwise · reddit · 2026-08-25

An audit of a custom fact-checking pipeline revealed that about 1 in 18 citation links were dead or non-existent. The root cause was trusting the model's generated citation list rather than the actual retrieval layer. Fixes include using only URLs returned by the retrieval layer, constraining the model to cite retrieved sets, probing URLs before display, and separating source reliability scores from domain reputation. The author emphasizes that 'model cited' does not equal 'source exists'.

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