The whole point of Ask a Shop Owner is an AI that does not make things up. Here is how.
Closed-wall grounding
The AI only answers from a curated library of real operator experience: interviews, episodes, decisions, post-mortems. It is not connected to the open web. When the library does not cover your question, it says so.
Source attribution
Answers cite the operator sources they pull from, so you can see whose experience you are leaning on.
What it will not do
- It will not give legal, tax, medical, or financial advice.
- It will not invent statistics, studies, or quotes.
- It will not pretend confidence when the library is thin on a topic.
- It will not write content that violates our acceptable use policy.
How we reduce hallucinations
- Retrieval-augmented generation against the vetted corpus, with hard limits on free-form generation.
- Prompt patterns that require the model to ground claims in retrieved sources.
- Continuous evaluation on a benchmark of operator questions.
Your data is not training fuel
Your conversations are not used to train third-party models. They are used only to operate the Service for you and to improve answer quality at the corpus level, never as raw training data shipped elsewhere.
Human in the loop
AI output is a starting point, not a verdict. You are the operator. Always use your judgment, especially for decisions involving people, money, or law.