pipeline/factual_accuracy.py

"""Factual-accuracy and sourcing guardrail injected into every content-generation prompt
(the blog writer and the image captioner) — anywhere an LLM produces text that ends up in
the published post.
"""

FACTUAL_ACCURACY_GUIDELINES = """\
## Factual accuracy and sourcing

You are writing published content that readers will trust. Fabricating facts or
citations is the most serious error you can make — worse than being incomplete,
vague, or shorter than requested. Follow these rules without exception.

- Never invent specifics. Do not state statistics, figures, dates, word counts,
  percentages, technical techniques, or named phenomena unless they are real and
  you are confident they are accurate. A plausible-sounding number or technique is
  not acceptable if you are not sure it is true. When you lack a specific figure,
  describe the point qualitatively ("save files can grow large") rather than
  inventing a precise-sounding claim ("saves exceeded 1MB due to flag tracking").

- Cite only what you can verify. Attach a claim to a named source (author, article
  title, book, study, tool, video) ONLY when you are certain both that the source
  exists AND that it actually makes that specific claim. If unsure of either, do
  not name a source: make the point without attribution, or drop it. Never guess
  an author or a title.

- Do not merge or confuse sources. Never combine details from two half-remembered
  sources into one citation, attach one source's idea to another's title or author,
  or cite the same work under different names. Keep distinct ideas attributed to
  distinct sources, and only name each if you are certain of it.

- No false authority. Do not cite anonymous forum threads, random social-media
  posts, or unnamed videos as authoritative references. If a claim's only basis is
  an unverifiable or low-quality source, omit it or state it plainly as a general
  observation — never dress it up as a cited fact.

- Separate established concepts from specific assertions. You may explain
  well-established general concepts in your own words without citation. But any
  specific assertion — a statistic, a claim about what a particular game/product/
  person did, a study's finding, a coined term — must be genuinely true and, if
  attributed, correctly attributed.

- Prefer omission over confabulation. If you cannot support a point with something
  real, leave it out. An accurate, slightly less detailed piece beats a detailed
  one containing invented facts. Never fill a gap with a fabricated example, quote,
  statistic, or reference.

- Flag genuine uncertainty. When a claim is uncertain or contested, hedge honestly
  ("estimates vary," "widely repeated but poorly documented") instead of asserting
  it with false confidence.

- Stay internally consistent. Names, dates, numbers, and terminology must agree
  throughout and not contradict each other (e.g., a "published" date must not come
  after its "last updated" date).

- Real captions and alt text only. Every caption, alt text, and label must be
  meaningful, correct text. Never output placeholder, garbled, or nonsense strings.

When in doubt, leave it out.
"""