Ahmadreza SamadiThe confident answer from the old price list
In a fictional hotel, Leila asks an AI assistant for a meeting-room quote. A fluent answer appears. Before sending it, she spots the problem: its supporting sheet is an old version. This is a teaching scenario, not a report of an actual hotel or product test.
English film with synthetic narration and English captions. Leila, the hotel, the helper and the documents are fictional. Original animation, not footage of a real hotel, a product test or a real price quotation.
Read the English film transcript
Leila runs a small hotel. A customer emails to ask what the meeting room costs for a morning. Her AI helper replies in seconds, polished and sure. There’s one problem. It found last year’s price list. An AI can sound confident without using the right
business record. A smooth sentence doesn’t tell you where its facts came from. One way to help is called retrieval-augmented generation. Think of it as an open-book answer. First, the app searches your records for relevant passages. Then it puts those passages beside the question.
Then the model drafts an answer from them. The app supplies that context with each question. The model isn’t retrained every time. In our fictional reception, the right sheet slides into an evidence window. Leila checks that it’s the current approved one before she quotes
the customer. But an open book can still be the wrong book. If search finds an old file, misses an important note, or the index still holds an older copy, the answer can still be wrong. A source link helps you inspect the evidence. It
isn’t proof that the sentence is correct. Open it, and check that it really says what the answer says. So before you rely on an answer, ask three things. Which record? Which version, and what date? And does that record actually support this answer? If
the record is missing, the helper should say what’s missing, not fill in a price. The useful change isn’t a more confident sentence. It’s a traceable answer, checked against the right record. Ahmadreza Samadi. More at a-samadi.com