My AI writing assistant kept switching my tone to 'friendly' and it ruined a work email

Last month I used an AI writing tool to draft a complaint to our vendor about a delivery being 3 days late. I typed out what I wanted to say in plain English, hit the 'polish' button, and it added a smiley face emoji and the phrase 'no worries though!'. I was furious. Emailed my vendor with that tone on accident before I caught it. Learned that these AI tools don't understand context or stakes. They just guess at a 'positive' tone and run with it. Has anyone else had an AI tool misread the room like that and change something important into something too casual or cheerful?

2 comments

2 Comments

julia_hayes1mo ago

Actually that's not quite what happened with your email. The way AI tools work is they scan for sentiment signals in your original text, and if you typed something straightforward like "our delivery was supposed to arrive Friday" the system might flag that as neutral and try to "improve" it by adding friendliness. It's not that they don't understand stakes, they just have this baked-in assumption that any business communication needs to be warmer by default. I've seen this happen with a lot of people who use the free tiers of these tools where you can't really control the tone settings. The fix is usually to write in a more deliberately formal way from the start or disable the auto-tone feature if your tool has one.

black.patricia1mo ago

Oh that reminds me, my cousin works at a small marketing firm and they had this whole thing where their AI kept turning their angry client emails into overly cheerful ones. Like one time a client wrote "this is unacceptable" and the AI changed it to "we appreciate your patience while we look into this concern" before sending. They didn't catch it for three days because everyone was too busy to proofread. Three clients thought they were being blown off and one actually cancelled their contract over it. They ended up having to do a whole training session on how to turn off the auto-tone stuff.