Two Very Different Modes

The policy that never existed

Someone asks the company assistant: what is our refund window?

Back comes a clear answer. Thirty days from delivery, minus shipping, store credit after fourteen days.

It is well written. It is plausible. It is completely invented, because the actual policy document was never in the conversation.

The person asking had no way to tell. That is the whole problem this block solves.

Two modes, one appearance

A model can answer in two fundamentally different ways.

Open generation. It answers from patterns absorbed during training. Fluent, general, and unanchored to your situation.

Grounded. It answers from material you put in front of it. Specific, checkable, anchored.

Here is the difficult part: the output looks the same. Same tone, same confidence, same polish. There is no visual signal that says "I made this up" or "I read this in your file".

So grounding is not something you can verify by reading. It is something you have to arrange, and then confirm.

Getting the material in

There are several ways, and they are genuinely not equivalent.

Paste it. The most reliable. Whatever you paste is in the context, in full, guaranteed.

Upload a file. Usually reliable for short files. For long ones, the system may only fetch parts.

A project or notebook with permanently attached sources. Convenient for repeated use, same fetching caveat.

A connector to your drive, inbox, or repository. Widest reach, least predictable about what actually gets read.

Live search. The model fetches pages during the answer. Grounded in something, but not necessarily in anything you chose.

The rule of thumb

The shorter the material and the more direct the route, the more certain you can be that the model actually saw it.

If a decision hangs on one specific paragraph, paste that paragraph. Do not attach the 200-page document containing it and hope.

This feels crude. It is also the single most effective habit in this entire block, and experienced users do it constantly.

A test you can run right now

Take a document only you have. Something internal, recent, or personal.

Ask a question about it without attaching it. Note the answer.

Now attach it and ask again.

If the two answers are similar, be suspicious rather than reassured: it may mean the attachment did nothing. If they differ, you have just watched the mode switch, and you will recognise it from now on.