Checking AI drafts before you send them

Read the draft against the order, not against itself. A draft can be smooth, polite and wrong. The smoothness is what makes the error easy to miss.

Why the slips happen

AI writing tools produce text that sounds right. They don't check it against your records. OpenAI's help page says its model can get dates and other facts wrong, and can answer unclear questions with too much confidence¹. Australia's privacy regulator notes that AI systems are known to give inaccurate or false results².

So plan for errors. They're not rare accidents, they're a known feature of the tools.

The usual slips in a flower shop

Dates and day names. The draft says Saturday when the order says Friday, or turns "next Friday" into the wrong week. It may also use a gift day from another country. Wikipedia says Mother's Day in Australia is celebrated on the second Sunday in May³, while Ireland and the UK celebrate it on the fourth Sunday of Lent³. A reply written for the wrong country could name the wrong day.

Times. "Between nine and noon" becomes "after nine," or a window turns into an exact promise. If you only gave a window, the draft shouldn't narrow it.

Addresses. Unit numbers drop out. A street becomes a road, or a suburb is swapped for a similar one. Postcodes and zip codes can change by one number. A draft may also "fix" an address it thinks is a typo.

Card messages. The tool polishes the customer's wording. It changes a name, fixes an in-joke, adds a heart or makes a short note longer. The card must carry exactly what the sender wrote, unless they asked you to tidy it.

Names. Spellings change, such as "Sian" turning into "Siân" or "Sean". The recipient and sender can be swapped.

Prices and extras. A delivery fee vanishes or a total is added up wrongly. A line appears that you never offered, such as free vases or same-day delivery.

Invented promises. "We'll call you when it's delivered." "Fresh for ages." If you didn't say it, remove it.

A routine that takes a minute

Do the same checks in the same order every time. Habit beats attention.

1. Open the order next to the draft. Never check from memory.
2. Read the date and day name. Check them against a calendar.
3. Read the address aloud, one part at a time: number, street, suburb, postcode.
4. Compare the card message with the original, word by word.
5. Check the price and what it includes.
6. Look for anything the draft added that wasn't in the order.
7. Send it yourself.

Anthropic's guide says to validate critical details, most of all when the stakes are high⁴. In a flower shop, the high-stakes pieces are the day, the address and the card.

Make the draft easier to check

You can reduce the work by how you ask.

• Tell the tool to use only the facts you've supplied and to leave a blank where one is missing. One maker's guide recommends telling the model to work only from the material you supply⁴.
• Put the card message in quotation marks and say "copy exactly."
• Ask it to list every date, address and price it used, then check that list against the order.
• For a big batch, the same guide suggests running one prompt a few times and comparing the results, because differences can point to mistakes⁴.

Treat the tool's own reply of "I've checked this" with caution. A second tool pass doesn't replace you reading the order.

Who checks, and when

The OAIC raises the question of where a human checks the work². In a small shop, write down who reads each kind of message before it goes out. The person who typed the order isn't always the best checker, since they see what they meant. If you have staff, a second pair of eyes on gift-day orders is cheap insurance.

When an error does reach a customer, correct it fast and plainly, and fix your routine. Keep a short list of past slips, since the same few come back.

OpenAI's guide agrees: treat the output as a draft, never the last word¹. Two jobs where this matters most are answering enquiries and writing the pickup notes.