Stop AI Summaries from Making Things Up
The fidelity ladder: Balanced, High, Strict — and the six-rule battery that keeps a summary inside its source.
Overview
Summary hallucination is quiet: a connective sentence here, a "presumably" there, a gap filled with plausible context — and the summary now says things the source never did. The fix is a fidelity contract, and this resource demonstrates the strictest rung on the most ordinary source: weekly status updates. Strict Fidelity's battery — do not invent, do not infer unsupported conclusions, do not add missing context, only summarize what appears, preserve numbers and names exactly, and write "Not covered in the source" for empty sections — turns even a mundane roundup into a document you can trust without re-reading the source.
Workflow
-
Match the rung to the stakes
Balanced for internal convenience, High when numbers and names matter, Strict when the summary IS the record.
-
Swap fidelity and diff the prompt
Load this setup, change the fidelity level, and watch the FIDELITY RULES block rewrite itself — three rungs, one axis.
-
Keep the gap rule
"Not covered in the source" is the cheapest hallucination insurance in the whole prompt — never delete it.
Why This Works
- Naming the failure ("do not add missing context") works better than asking for accuracy
- The gap rule converts invention pressure into honest blanks
- Demonstrating strict mode on a mundane source proves fidelity is about trust, not document type
Best for
- Summaries that get forwarded without the source attached
- Teams who've caught a summary saying more than the source
- Mundane sources too — status updates get misquoted as much as contracts
Not for
- Creative rewriting or expansion — fidelity rules exist to prevent exactly that
- Fact-checking the source itself — fidelity keeps the summary inside the source, right or wrong
Use cases
- Hardening any summary prompt against quiet invention
- Choosing the right fidelity rung for the source's stakes
- Making gaps visible instead of plausibly filled