What AI may assist with
AI tools can be useful for organising research, comparing versions of documents, finding repeated themes, drafting plain-English explanations, spotting broken relationships between pages, testing search terms and checking large content sets for consistency. Those tasks can reduce mechanical work and surface questions for review.
AI is not authority
An AI answer is not a source of law, regulation or policy. Material legal claims, current deadlines, jurisdiction rules and regulator powers should be checked against suitable current sources. Fluency and confidence are not substitutes for verification.
Private documents and case material
AI may be used privately to help compare documents or identify issues in material supplied for editorial work. A private document is not automatically suitable for publication. Confidential or identifying material should be minimised, and public content derived from a private case should be generalised and independently supportable.
What AI must not decide
- whether a disputed event definitely happened;
- whether a person is legally liable on facts the system has not fully examined;
- whether a court or ombudsman will uphold a case;
- whether a private source is authentic merely because it appears plausible;
- whether a current rule is still in force without checking an authoritative source;
- whether sensitive personal data should be published.
Editorial safeguards
AI-assisted drafts are reviewed for scope, dates, jurisdiction, unsupported certainty, invented citations, mismatched legal frameworks and internal consistency. Related pages should be checked when a cross-cutting rule changes. Public source links are preferred over opaque model assertions.
The public site and AI
Ordinary ConsumerWise guides do not require users to upload case files to an AI system. Current public tools are rule-based/browser-based rather than a live generative-AI advice service. If ConsumerWise later introduces an AI feature that receives visitor prompts or documents, it will require a separate privacy, security, retention and safety assessment before launch.
Responsibility stays with ConsumerWise
AI assistance does not transfer editorial responsibility. If an assisted draft contains an error, ConsumerWise remains responsible for correcting the publication. “The model said it” is not an editorial defence.