When AI Gets it Wrong: 5 Times You Should NEVER Use AI

I just love AI! I use it for everything now—emails, work reports, social media posts, even love letters to my girlfriend! How did I ever live without it?

—Bruno

Clearly, Bruno enjoys using AI tools and it sounds like he’s been getting good results. But at some point, he’s likely to run into trouble. AI isn’t perfect. Depending too much on it can be disastrous, especially when it comes to certain types of professional or personal writing.

If you want to avoid embarrassing mistakes, low grades, legal problems, or making a bad impression, here are five situations where you should never use AI for your writing.

1. When you need to provide thorough, accurate information

AI tools like ChatGPT are great at making text read smoothly, but that doesn’t mean their output will be correct. If you’re working on legal documents, medical reports, academic papers, financial statements, or anything that requires 100% accuracy, you cannot rely on AI to give you correct, detailed, up-to-date information.

As we learned in a previous article, AI tools do not understand what they are writing. Their algorithms generate responses from the data they have been trained on. If that data is flawed, then the text the AI produces will also be flawed. An AI system might also combine various pieces of data in a way that results in something weird. We see this most often with AI-generated images (like the 1960s supermarket scene below), but it can also happen with writing.

Even if your AI tool does give you accurate data, it is not an expert in your field. Therefore, your end result will be about as sophisticated as a Wikipedia article. This isn’t likely to impress your boss, your clients, or your professor.

It’s okay to use AI to help you organize your ideas or put together a first draft, but you should be the one doing the actual research or providing the data. AI tools just aren’t up to the job.

2. When your reputation is on the line

Imagine you’re an automotive design intern and you’re sending an AI-generated cover letter in the hopes of landing your dream job. Then you realize the AI simply regurgitated a bunch of generic phrases before it claimed you used to be a Chevrolet. Yikes! You’d definitely want to catch that mistake before you click “send”.

You’re also taking a big risk if you’re using AI-generated content for your academic work and pretending you wrote those papers yourself. Although most of the current AI checkers are unreliable, they are evolving and becoming more sophisticated, as are the teachers who use them. You do not want to jeopardize your academic career by getting caught turning in an essay generated by a robot!

3. When you need to provide fresh ideas

AI tools can remix existing ideas, but that’s all. They are not truly creative. Even the notoriously weird AI-generated art is based on tripped-up algorithms, not on genuine artistic inspiration.

So if you need a compelling brand message, an original story, or unique content, AI will probably leave you with something that feels, well, robotic. If your competitors are also using AI, chances are it will produce very similar content for each one of you. You will have a tough time standing out from the crowd.

AI-generated content also lacks emotional depth. After all, an AI tool doesn’t feel anything. And how will Bruno’s girlfriend react when she finds out that he didn’t actually write those love letters he sent her?

4. When privacy and security are essential

Here’s just a sampling of the kind of information you might include in a typical one-page business email:

• Your name
• The name of your company
• The name of your boss
• The names of your colleagues
• The names of associates at other businesses
• Sales data
• Ideas for projects or marketing
• Problems your company is experiencing (e.g., supply chain issues, work delays, labor disputes, anything related to money)
• Medical details about individuals (e.g., a colleague is on sick leave due to a serious illness)
• Details about lawsuits involving your company
• Agreements between your company and another business

AI tools save everything you type into them. So if AI is writing your emails, it will add all of your personal and/or business information to its system and use it to train its language models. You never know where your content might turn up someday!

5. When grammar and clarity are key

Although AI writing is generally pretty good, these tools still often make grammar mistakes or produce awkward sentences that don’t flow naturally. Their vocabulary also tends to be limited—they use the same words and phrases over and over again.

AI mistakes can be costly when your writing needs to sound professional. They can also steer you in the wrong direction if you’re using AI to help you improve your English. While it can be beneficial to play around with an AI chatbot if you want to practice typing and reading English sentences, it’s no substitute for interacting with a native speaker.

The bottom line is that AI is a tool, not a replacement for human expertise. If you want writing that is clear, natural, compelling, and mistake-free, don’t leave it to chance—or to a robot.