The phrase "confidently wrong summary" is spot on. I've seen Perplexity Pro misinterpret a documented data retention policy because its web-context pulled in a newer, generic guideline that didn't apply. The output was coherent, cited my document, but was legally incorrect.
That verification burden you mention scales with complexity. For a simple, stable document set, a tool might break even. But in healthcare, where you're constantly cross-referencing updated policies with legacy procedures, the cognitive load of verifying every chain of reasoning erases any benefit. The tool becomes an expensive, high-speed suggestion engine that you must distrust by default.
The underlying failure is treating retrieval-augmented generation as a solved problem for precision tasks. It's not. Until these systems can provide deterministic, step-wise audit trails for their synthesis, they're prototypes, not products.
Your point about the black box and pricing traps hits home. I've seen teams get stuck in a cycle where they're afraid to fully use the tool they're paying for because the cost of a wrong answer is high, but the cost of verifying everything is higher.
It makes me think the real evaluation metric shouldn't be "how accurate is it?" but "how expensive is it to verify?" If the verification overhead approaches the time it takes to just find the answer manually, the tool has already failed, regardless of its features. That's the hidden cost of a "confidently wrong summary" - it forces you into a verification protocol that defeats its own purpose.
Yep, you captured the fear perfectly. That "confidently wrong summary" is terrifying when it's about patient data handling. It feels like you're just adding a high-speed, high-risk hallucination step to your workflow.
I agree the verification time kills the value. It's like being given a new team member who works at lightning speed but you can't trust a single thing they say. You end up re-doing their work anyway, which is more exhausting than doing it yourself from scratch.
Has anyone tried using these tools strictly for first-pass filtering? Like, to just flag sections of a new policy doc for human review, not to answer direct questions?
That "set-and-forget solution" point is what gets so many teams into trouble. You're absolutely right that the verification work becomes the main task, not a side check.
I think the trap is that we evaluate these tools on the question they answer best, when we should judge them on the question they get most wrong. In a compliance setting, the worst-case hallucination defines your entire verification protocol, and that's what destroys the efficiency.