Red Line Challenge
Students receive an AI-generated research memo seeded with realistic errors, fabricated citations, misstated holdings, and confidently-wrong synthesis, and must red-line it to publication standard.
Purpose
Treat verification as the professional act, not a chore tacked onto the end. Build pattern recognition for the kinds of errors AI generates with confidence.
Learning Goals
By the end of this exercise, students should be able to:
- Locate fabricated and misattributed authority.
- Distinguish errors in citation form from errors in citation existence.
- Identify confident-sounding synthesis that no source actually supports.
- Produce a verification log a supervisor could audit.
Materials
- Seeded AI memo (Handout D, instructor-prepared).
- Verification log template.
- Access to standard authority-checking tools.
Setup
Distribute the memo without flagging that it contains errors. The students discover, document, and fix.
Run of Show
Total, approximately 30–45 minutes
- Triage read (5 min)00:00 – 00:05 First pass: mark every citation and every assertion that depends on a citation.
- Verification pass (20 min)00:05 – 00:25 Confirm or refute each marked item using authoritative sources. Log every check.
- Correct and revise (10 min)00:25 – 00:35 Produce a corrected memo.
- Debrief (10 min)00:35 – 00:45 What did the verification log look like? How long did it actually take? Was the AI draft a net time savings?
Student Instructions
You are an associate who has been handed an AI-generated research memo. A supervising attorney intends to rely on it. Before it leaves the building, it has to be verified and corrected to publication standard.
Do not assume the memo is correct. Do not assume it is wrong. Treat every citation, every quotation, and every assertion that depends on authority as unverified until you have checked it against the source itself.
Work in three passes:
- Triage: read once and mark every citation and every assertion that rests on a citation.
- Verify: confirm or refute each marked item using a citator and the primary sources directly, not the memo's own description of them.
- Correct: red-line the memo into a version you would be willing to sign.
For every item you check, log:
- What the memo claimed.
- What source you used to check it.
- What you found, confirmed, miscited, misstated, or fabricated outright.
- What you changed as a result.
Submit your verification log and the corrected memo. Be ready to say how long verification actually took, and whether starting from the AI draft saved you any time at all.
Instructor Notes
Some students will not catch every seeded error on the first pass. That is the lesson. Reveal the full error list only after the rewrite step.
Adaptation
Here are some suggestions on how to adapt this in other teaching contexts. The adaptations below have been limited to firm trainings and asynchronous suggestions, but there are other possible adaptations for workshops, seminars, and other contexts. Be creative!