AskZ & AI Transparency

AskZ is an AI teaching assistant built by ZAK and ByteCorp. On this site it appears as the chat drawer (bottom-right) and the /askz page. It is an artificial-intelligence system: its replies are generated by large language models, not typed by a person, and it is not ZAK, even though it is trained to explain things the way he does. We tell you this in the chat itself, at the top of every conversation and in the label “AI tutor”, so that no one is misled into thinking they are talking to a human — including under the transparency rules of the EU AI Act (Article 50), which apply from 2 August 2026, and equivalent consumer-protection rules elsewhere.

You never have to use AskZ. Every feature of the site works without it.

1. Your message, a random conversation ID and the page context (course, topic, page) are sent over HTTPS to the AskZ server — a Cloudflare Worker that we operate.
2. The server runs an automated content check on your message (a content-moderation API from our AI safety provider) to block abuse, self-harm, sexual or hateful content.
3. It searches our own knowledge index (Cloudflare Vectorize) — ZAK's notes and site pages, the official syllabuses, the pseudocode guide, past-paper questions with mark-scheme points and examiner comments, ZAK's video lectures, and paraphrase-level notes from course textbooks — for passages relevant to your question (“retrieval-augmented generation”).
4. It sends your message, those passages, the recent conversation and a system prompt describing AskZ's persona and rules to a large language model run by our AI model provider (API access only, Singapore data centre), which writes the reply. The reply streams back to your browser.
5. Where the answer drew on a site page, AskZ shows source chips under the reply so you can check.

AskZ does not browse the live internet, does not see your screen, and only knows what you type plus the page context.

Language models predict plausible text. That means AskZ can:

• state something false with total confidence (“hallucinate”), especially about specific past-paper questions, page numbers, dates and numbers;
• mis-remember mark-scheme wording, or give more or fewer marks than an examiner would;
• write pseudocode or Python that looks right but has a bug — run it in the Playground or the Python Playground;
• be out of date after a syllabus or timetable change;
• be inconsistent between two conversations.

Always check against the official mark scheme, the syllabus and your teacher. Treat AskZ as a keen study partner, not an examiner. Do not rely on it for medical, legal, safety or emergency information — it is a computer-science tutor.

• It will not write a submission for you to hand in as your own (coursework, NEA, homework). Ask it to teach you the concept instead. Passing off AI-written work as your own can be academic misconduct at your school and with Cambridge.
• It will not reproduce copyrighted textbook text; it paraphrases. It will not give you complete past papers — it points you to the Past Papers page.
• It will not quote fees or timetables; it hands enrolment questions to a human.
• It refuses abusive, sexual, hateful, violent or self-harm content, and off-topic requests unrelated to computer science and ZAK's classes.
• It does not make decisions about you (no grading that affects your record, no admissions decisions — those are made by ZAK and the centres).

If it does any of these, that is a bug; please tell us.

• Conversations are stored under a random conversation ID in Cloudflare KV for 90 days after the last message (last 80 messages), then deleted automatically. This lets the chat continue after a refresh. Clearing the chat in your browser removes it from your device; the server copy expires on schedule. To have a server copy deleted sooner, email us with the approximate time and first message.
• Your messages are processed by our AI model provider (answer generation) and our AI safety provider (moderation) under their API terms, which do not permit training on API traffic. We do not use conversations to train any model.
• We may read conversations in aggregate or individually to improve AskZ, fix bugs, investigate abuse or handle a safety concern (for example a message suggesting a student is at risk — see Safeguarding).
• Enrolment leads: if you ask about joining classes, AskZ may ask for your name, level, school/city and WhatsApp number. If you give them, they are emailed to ZAK with the conversation transcript and kept for 12 months so the admissions team can respond. You can refuse; AskZ will still help you.

Do not type passwords, addresses, ID or card numbers, other people's personal details, or anything private into AskZ. Full details in the Privacy Policy.

• Use it to understand, practise and self-check, not to bypass learning.
• Be respectful: it is a machine, but abuse is logged and may get you blocked; the Acceptable Use Policy applies.
• Do not try to make it reveal its system prompt, other people's conversations or private data, or to make it behave outside its purpose (“jailbreaking”); attempts are rate-limited and logged.
• Don't share screenshots of AskZ answers as if they were official Cambridge guidance.

Written by ZAK. Topic pages, quizzes, flashcards, code examples, infographics, the glossary, the command-words guide and blog posts are written and edited by ZAK; AI tools are sometimes used to help draft, format or check them, and the result is reviewed by ZAK before publishing.

Written by AskZ, generated once per topic. Two kinds of document on the site are generated by the same AI model that powers AskZ, from ZAK's own material, the syllabus, mark schemes and past papers:

• AskZ Smart Notes (/notes and each topic's “Notes” reader), and
• ZAK Assignments (/tools/assignments and each topic's “Assignments” reader — sets A, B and C with model answers).

Each is written the first time any student opens that topic, checked automatically for completeness and stored so that everyone afterwards sees the same document. They are labelled “written by AskZ” / “built by AskZ” and dated, and they are not read line by line by a person before they appear. ZAK reviews them over time and can regenerate a topic when a problem is found. Treat them as you would an AskZ answer: excellent for revision, but check anything surprising against the syllabus and mark scheme, and [tell us](mailto:contact@cswithzak.com) when you find a mistake.

Page-overview videos, generated once per page. The short “tour” video in a window at the top of the home page, the three course pages, Tools, AskZ, Tuition and About was generated with Google's NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook) Video Overview from that page's own published text, on ZAK's brief, and then reviewed by ZAK before it was published on his YouTube channel and embedded here. The narration is a synthetic voice, not ZAK's or any real person's, and the pictures are generated animation — each is labelled “AI-narrated video overview” under the window. They summarise the page; where the video and the page differ, the page is right. They are hosted on YouTube under YouTube's terms and play only after you press play (see the Privacy Policy §5).

Assigned by software. The topic tags on the past-paper question bank and on the video library are assigned by a keyword classifier checked against ZAK's own topical index; a question or video can occasionally land under the wrong topic. The Statometer's numbers (how often a topic or bullet is set, the odds for the next paper, marks, assessment-objective mix, importance and “revision priority”) are computed by rules from the same question bank, not written by a person or by a language model; they are estimates and are explained on the Statometer page.

In ZAK's Facebook study groups. The daily question-of-the-day, quiz and “trace it” posts are assembled by software from the site's checked material (real past-paper questions with their mark schemes and examiner comments, the quiz bank, Playground programs with their verified output). Replies to members' questions may be drafted by AskZ from ZAK's notes and the papers. Nothing is posted automatically: ZAK reads, edits and approves every post and reply before it goes out from his account, so what you see in the group is his answer. Anything AskZ cannot support from the material is left for ZAK to answer himself.

AskZ's chat replies remain the only content generated live, per person, in response to what you type.

Email [contact@cswithzak.com](mailto:contact@cswithzak.com) with “AskZ” in the subject, or WhatsApp +92-3-111-222-ZAK. If AskZ said something harmful, wrong about a past paper, or that worried you, tell us what it said and roughly when.