What AI Doesn't Know About the Employer You're Writing To
When you read a generated cover letter, you check the sentences about yourself, because you know whether they are true. The sentences about the employer go straight past, because you have no baseline to compare them to. Those are the ones to worry about. A model asked to write a letter will produce confident statements about the company, none of which it has any basis for, and you are the one whose name is at the bottom.
This is a short post about one narrow risk. The broader workflow for drafting a letter with AI is in don’t feed your resume to a cover letter prompt.
The four kinds of assertion to look for
Market characterisation. “As a leader in the sector.” “In a rapidly consolidating market.” These are claims about an industry’s structure. You did not supply them and you probably cannot support them.
Product or service description. A sentence describing what the company does or sells, at a level of specificity you did not provide. It may be right. It may describe a product they retired, or a business line they never had.
Values and mission language. “Your commitment to sustainability.” “Your focus on customer obsession.” Sometimes this is on their website; sometimes it is the generic phrasing that fits a company of that type. From the reader’s side, praising a value the company does not claim is worse than saying nothing.
Current-state claims. Growth, expansion, a recent launch, a strategic direction. These are the riskiest, because they are time-sensitive and a general-purpose text model has no reliable picture of when anything happened.
“It probably read their website” is not a defence
Unless you pasted their page into the conversation, the model is working from whatever general impression it formed of that name — which may be another company with a similar name, or nothing at all. A specific-sounding sentence produced from no input is generated, in exactly the way an invented resume number is generated, and it will read just as plausibly.
If you did paste their page, then the material came from you and you can check it, which is the whole point.
The rule: paste, don’t ask
Never ask what a company does or what it cares about. Read their own material yourself, decide what is worth referring to, and paste that text in as the source — with an instruction that no claims about the company may go beyond it.
Below is text from their careers page. Use only what is in it if you refer to the company at all. Do not add any characterisation of their market, products, or values that is not in this text.
Then check the output against the pasted text, the same comparison you would run on a bullet against your own record, per how to check an AI-written bullet against your own record.
If you have nothing true to say about them, say nothing
A letter does not require a paragraph of appreciation. If you have not looked into the employer enough to write one accurate sentence about them, the honest options are to look into them or to write about the work instead — the problem you would be solving, why it interests you, what you have done that is close to it. That is a real reason, it is entirely yours, and it cannot be fabricated by anything.
The failure mode to avoid is letting the model supply the enthusiasm. “I have long admired your work in this space” is a small false statement that one interview question takes apart, and it sits in the same category as any other claim you cannot back up: a claim you cannot back up.
The check, in one line
Read the finished letter and underline every sentence that is about them rather than about you. For each one, ask where you got it. Anything you cannot answer gets deleted — not softened, deleted. Then confirm that what is left agrees with the rest of the application, per using AI across a whole application.