Quality assurance

AI quality assurance that runs before anyone else reads it.

Quality assurance for AI output is not one test. It is a repeatable gate: mechanical checks that catch what is measurable, a published standard so every finding can be argued with, and a named reviewer for the calls no script can make.

The work is the evidence that it held.

Why AI output needs its own QA

Generated work fails differently from human work. It is fluent, well formatted and confident, which is exactly why it passes the glance test that most review processes rely on. The defects sit in assumptions rather than syntax: a function that handles the happy path and silently returns nothing for the rest, a statistic with an invisible source, a screenshot that lost the metadata proving where it came from.

Traditional QA assumes a fixed requirement and a deterministic intent. Generative pipelines have neither. What they do have is repeatable failure modes, and those can be tested.

What a QA gate for AI output contains

A gate worth relying on has four layers, and each one answers a different question.

  • Rule checks: does this output contain a pattern we know to be a defect, whether it was written by a person or a model?
  • Weighting: how bad is it, and does one systemic problem bury ten smaller ones?
  • Evidence: can each finding be traced to a written rule, so a disagreement has somewhere to go?
  • Escalation: does the process stop at the edge of what a deterministic check can prove, and hand over to a person with a name?

Where the line is drawn

Offline checks can prove the absence of known defects. They cannot prove the presence of quality: whether the argument holds, whether the tone fits the audience, whether the liability sits somewhere nobody looked. Pretending otherwise is how verification tools become a rubber stamp.

So the report states what ran, what it found and what it could not see. When the stakes are high enough that the gap matters, a specialist reads the work, records the changes they made and signs the verdict. Both artifacts attach to the deliverable.

What the checks look for

  • Invented APIs

    Calls to methods that do not exist on the library version you actually have.

  • Truncation and placeholders

    Output that stopped mid-thought, or still carries TODO, lorem ipsum and [insert].

  • Unsourced claims

    Numbers, dates and quotations that arrived without an origin you can open.

  • Stripped media metadata

    Images and audio that lost the provenance signals a real file would carry.

  • Unhandled failure paths

    Empty catches, silent defaults and optimistic network assumptions.

Questions this page usually raises

Is AI quality assurance the same as content moderation?
No. Moderation asks whether material is allowed. QA asks whether the work is fit for the purpose it was produced for: correct, complete, sourced and safe to publish.
Does QA require uploading our files to a server?
The automated checks run as plain browser code on the text you paste, so the draft stays on the machine it was written on. Only files you deliberately attach to a human review leave the browser.
Can QA be applied to output we already shipped?
Yes, and it is a reasonable first use. Run the checker across published pages or a sample of your library, fix what scores badly, and use the reports as a baseline for the next release.

AI quality assurance

Run the checks, then decide who needs to sign it.

The automated pass is free, needs no account and uploads nothing. Escalate to a named reviewer only where being wrong is expensive.