When an AI writes your recommendation letter

A recommendation letter is a strange kind of document because its value does not come from how well it is written. It comes from the fact that a specific person, who actually observed the applicant, is putting their name behind what they saw. When an AI is brought into that, the question is what survives the transfer.

The Texas A&M Writing Center guide on recommendation letters anchors the letter in the right place. It advises writing about traits and accomplishments you have actually observed, grounding them in your relationship with the person and in specific examples, and getting the person’s consent before including personal information. The guide also draws a line between using an AI template and writing from your own direct experience, and that line is the whole issue.

Here is my reading of it. A drafting assistant can do one part of the job well: take facts you supply and shape them into clean, professional prose. If you hand it the observed facts, it can arrange them, smooth the transitions, and produce something that reads like a letter. What it cannot do is supply the observation. It did not sit in your class, or supervise the project, or watch the person handle a hard situation. Its account of the person comes only from the material you give it for this letter, not from being there.

Let me make the responsibility concrete with a clearly fictional example, not a real student and not my own history. Suppose you are writing for a former employee, and you supply this fact: she rebuilt the onboarding process after the old one kept failing new hires, cutting the time to first useful contribution from six weeks to two. A drafting assistant can word that cleanly. What it cannot do is know whether that fact is true, whether you actually saw it happen, and whether she wants that detail shared. Those checks are yours, and they cannot be delegated.

There is a stricter rule I would hold myself to, and I want to be clear that it is my own recommendation, not the guide’s policy. Before I sent the letter, I would read it and ask of every sentence: did I observe this, or did the assistant make it sound plausible? If the assistant made it sound plausible, I would cut it or replace it with something I actually saw. That is a strict standard, and I am not claiming the guide demands it. It is simply the standard I think a recommendation letter deserves, and you are free to hold a looser one.

A recommendation letter is a voucher, and a voucher is worth only what the person signing it is willing to stand behind. An assistant can help you say what you know. It cannot know it for you.