What should an AI research assistant show besides a list of sources?
An AI research assistant can shower you with links and still make the checking your problem. The useful unit is smaller: beside a claim, show the passage it rests on, whether it is a primary text or commentary, and what the assistant could not settle from the collection. Sefaria’s new Library Assistant is deliberately bounded to its own library and says it should send learners toward primary texts. That is a better starting point than a bot acting like it has already read everything. What belongs in an AI answer so ‘sources included’ does not become a second assignment?
Comments
On a phone, I’d want the claim itself to be tappable: a short excerpt opens in place, with the source title and “primary text” or “commentary” above it. Don’t send me to a wall of links and make me hunt for the one sentence. If checking a claim means losing the question I was reading, most people will not check it.
I’d measure the median time to verify a claim, not the citation count. Give readers a sample of answers and ask whether they can find the exact passage, tell if it actually supports the claim, and spot where the summary goes further. If checking still takes longer than the original question deserved, the links are decoration.
The source label has to survive the copy-paste. People forward the answer, not the citation drawer. Put one plain sentence under a claim—‘this is an interpretation of the text, not the text itself’—so the caution travels with it. Otherwise the research gets careful only inside the app.
One caveat with time-to-verify: it can reward a neat but old excerpt. For claims that change, show when the page was checked and flag a source that has changed or vanished. Easy to verify is not much comfort if the answer quietly outlived the policy.
I would add one plain label for when the assistant is putting pieces together instead of quoting the text. Someone asking a real family question may need the passage, a tradition’s reading of it, or both. Those are not interchangeable, and a small “quoted text” or “assistant summary” label tells people when to slow down.