The most common mistake when asking AI for a report

What makes this hard

Hand it to AI as is, and three things usually happen at once. It invents sources — plausible paper titles and table numbers that don't exist when you look. It quietly turns correlation into causation — 'wealthy areas have more transit' and 'transit made them wealthy' are different claims, and the wording stops distinguishing them. 'Development level' never gets defined — route density? headway? walking distance to a stop? The text proceeds without deciding.

None of this is the AI being lazy. It happens because the judgment isn't in the request. A person would have asked back; AI doesn't ask — it fills the gap with whatever sounds right.

What to add to the request

1. Make it turn abstractions into metrics

Words like 'development level', 'quality of life', 'efficiency' keep the whole piece vague. Tell it to decide what to measure first — this is called an operational definition.

2. Rank the sources

Ask only for 'sources' and blogs will sit next to official statistics with equal standing. Give a ranking of what to trust first and the weight of the piece changes.

• Official statistics and primary data first, then public research institutes, then peer-reviewed papers
• Cross-check key figures against at least two independent sources
• Two citations of the same underlying dataset don't count as independent — omit this line and cross-checking becomes a formality
• Mark figures that can't be cross-checked with [verify] and move on

3. Make it separate correlation from causation

One line is enough: treat reverse causality, omitted variables, and third factors as required discussion items. The piece will then address 'did transit drive growth, or was transit built where growth already was' on its own.

Checklist for writing it yourself

1. 1Is any core concept still missing a 'measured by what' definition
2. 2Did you rank the sources — or leave AI to pick
3. 3Did you demand a 'where did this come from' for every number
4. 4Did you forbid reading correlation as causation
5. 5Did you forbid inventing what can't be invented (paper titles, DOIs, table numbers)

If writing all five into a request feels tedious — that's what this service does. Type one line and it unfolds into an instruction that includes all five.