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Paste your notes or a textbook chapter into an AI chat and ask a question, and the AI can still answer from everything else it has read. Before an exam, that matters, because you are marked against your book. The fix: give the AI the source, make it quote the lines it used, and check those quotes yourself.
Can you make AI answer only from your textbook or notes?
Partly. You can tell a chatbot to stay inside a source and show the lines it used, but that is not a guarantee. In a 2023 audit of four AI search engines, Nelson Liu, Tianyi Zhang and Percy Liang found that on average, only 51.5% of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations, and only 74.5% of citations supported the sentence they were attached to. A benchmark study by Tianyu Gao and colleagues found that even the best models they tested lacked complete citation support about half the time on one set of questions.
Newer tools may do better than those tested in 2023, but a citation is still a claim, not proof. Ask for exact quotes, which you can search for in seconds, rather than page numbers, which can be made up, as we explained in why AI tutors invent fake NCERT page numbers.
What prompt makes AI answer only from your notes?
Paste one section at a time, not a whole book. In the study known as "Lost in the Middle", language models often did best when the relevant information sat at the beginning or end of a long input, and worse when it sat in the middle.
Then type something like this:
"Here is a section of my notes, between the words START and END."
"Answer my question using only this text. Do not use outside knowledge."
"After each sentence of your answer, give the exact words from the text that support it, in quotation marks."
"If the text does not answer the question, say 'Not in my notes' and tell me what is missing."
"My question is: ..."
Line 4 matters most. Without it, the AI fills gaps from memory and you cannot tell which parts came from your page. See also how to prompt an AI to say when it is unsure.
How do you check whether the AI drifted from your source?
Run this check on any answer you plan to learn from.
Find each quote. Search the pasted text (Ctrl+F on a laptop, "Find in page" on a phone) for a few words of every quote. If it is missing, that sentence is untrusted.
Read the quote in context. Read the lines around it. Does the source say something narrower? Words like "usually", "for an ideal gas" and "for small angles" are the ones that get dropped.
Look for unquoted sentences. A sentence with no quote came from somewhere else. Check it in your textbook before relying on it.
Ask a trap question. Once per session, ask something you know is not on the pasted pages. The right reply is "Not in my notes". If the AI answers confidently anyway, trust the rest of the session less.
What does drift look like in a real answer?
Say your physics notes contain this line: "Action and reaction act on different bodies, so they never cancel each other." You paste the page and ask: "Why doesn't a book lying on a table accelerate?"
A drifted answer might say: "The book's weight and the normal force are an action-reaction pair, so they cancel." It attaches your line as the quote. Step 1 passes, because the quote is real. Step 2 catches the problem: your note says action-reaction forces act on different bodies, but the weight and the normal force both act on the book. The quote does not support the sentence; it contradicts it.
A faithful answer would use your line to explain why action-reaction pairs cannot cancel, then say "Not in my notes" for the rest, since the page says nothing about the forces on the book itself. That gap is useful: it tells you exactly what to look up next.
When is this method not enough?
This routine cannot fix a source that is wrong or thin. If your class notes skipped a step, an AI quoting them faithfully will skip it too. When the gap is in your understanding, slower help works better, such as asking AI to explain an NCERT paragraph line by line.
For a concept your notes never explain, the Fermi Concept Library has a lesson for every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing. Fermi's AI tutor works out what you already know and builds a plan for the session, so a gap in your notes becomes a clear next step.
Tonight, run the prompt on one page of your notes and check every quote before you learn the answer.
