A wrong AI answer can quickly be copied into blogs, newsletters and social media. If others reuse it afterwards, an incorrect claim can start to feel increasingly credible. That is why source checking still matters.
"ChatGPT said so" is not a source
Something has changed in how people share information.
A few years ago, someone might say "I read it on a website." Then "I saw it on Facebook." Now the phrase I hear constantly, from business owners in Calpe, from estate agents in Jávea, from people starting new businesses in Altea and Moraira, is this:
"ChatGPT said so."
Said it as if that settles it.
How misinformation travels
Here's how it works in practice.
Someone asks an AI tool a question. The AI produces an answer. Some of that answer is accurate. Some of it is filled in from patterns, as we covered in the previous article. The person doesn't check. They publish it: in a blog post, in a newsletter, in a Facebook group, in a website page.
Someone else reads the content, summarises it or reuses it. That can happen manually or with AI. The original error can then spread further without anyone returning to the source.
Over time, a claim can be repeated often enough to sound familiar and therefore credible. It might be an invented statistic, a rule that does not apply in Spain or a price taken from another market.
The Stanford Cyber Policy Center has documented how AI-generated content lowers the cost of producing misinformation at scale. Content that previously took teams of people to create can now be generated in seconds, and once it's published it gets indexed, summarised, and shared before anyone checks it.
The local version of this problem
On the Costa Blanca, this plays out in a very specific way.
Estate agents in Altea sharing AI-written descriptions of the buying process in Spain. Some of that information is accurate for a general European market. Some of it isn't accurate for Spain. Some of it isn't accurate for the Valencia region specifically.
Business owners in Calpe asking AI for advice on local licensing, then putting that advice on their website as if it's fact. Visitors in Benidorm writing AI-generated reviews. Tour operators in Jávea using AI to write content about local areas without anyone who actually knows those areas checking it first.
None of these people are trying to mislead anyone. They're using a tool that feels reliable because it sounds reliable. That's the problem.
When the wrong information is about somewhere general, the damage is limited. When it's about Calpe's building regulations, Moraira's rental licensing rules, or the specific process for buying a property in the Valencia region, someone reading it from Amsterdam and planning a move here is going to make decisions based on it.
The "automation bias" problem
There's a name for what happens when people trust AI output more than they should.
NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, calls it automation bias: the tendency to consider AI-generated content as better or more reliable than other sources, simply because a computer produced it.
NIST's AI Risk Management Framework documents this as one of the primary risks of AI systems in real-world use. People override their own judgment because the AI seemed so confident.
It's the same reason the lawyer in New York in the previous article didn't check the cases ChatGPT cited. They looked right. The AI was confident. The lawyer's instinct to verify got overridden by the plausibility of the output.
That happens at a small scale every day. A business owner in La Nucia reads an AI answer about VAT rules and stops there. A property buyer in Alfaz del Pi reads an AI-generated summary of the buying process and treats it as a guide. A new arrival in Denia asks AI for advice on setting up a business and follows it without checking with a gestor.
SEO and the quality spiral
There's a side effect that affects everyone who has a website on the Costa Blanca.
Large volumes of low-quality or incorrect AI content can pollute the information environment. Search engines may index those pages and people or other systems may reuse them. That does not mean every new AI model automatically trains on every piece of AI content online, but it does mean errors can spread quickly through publication and reuse.
Google's documentation on helpful content says the production method itself is not the deciding factor. Google wants useful, reliable, people-first content. Publishing large amounts of low-quality content mainly to manipulate search traffic can fall under spam policies whether or not AI was involved.
The practical advantage for local businesses is therefore not 'using less AI than competitors'. It is publishing better content: accurate, specific, current and clearly relevant to Costa Blanca customers.
But if your site also contains unreviewed AI content with wrong local details, wrong dates, or claims that can't be verified, it gets caught in the same downward spiral.
The difference between a source and a summary
This is the practical point that matters most.
An AI answer is not a primary source by itself. It may retrieve, summarise and cite real sources, so the useful question is: which source supports this specific claim?
A real source has an author. A date. A location. A publication. Something you can point to and say: this is where this information came from, this is when it was written, this is who wrote it, and this is the country it applies to.
"ChatGPT said so" is not a source citation by itself. If ChatGPT or another system shows sources, open the actual page and check the date, publisher and whether it applies to your situation in Altea, Jávea, Calpe or elsewhere.
That doesn't mean AI output is useless. It means you need to follow it back to a real source before you act on it or publish it.
The next and final article in this series is about how to actually do that: how to use AI in a way that saves you time without letting it make decisions for you.
Read part 4: How to use AI without blindly trusting it.
If you want to know whether the content on your website is helping or hurting your reputation in local search, send me your URL on WhatsApp and I'll give you a straight answer.
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