March 11, 2026
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AI autocomplete doesn’t just change the way you write. it changes the way you think
AI-powered writing tools are increasingly integrated into email and phone calls. A new study reveals that biased suggestions by AI may shake users’ beliefs
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Autocomplete suggestions are probably one of the most annoying “nice” tools when it comes to writing. Increasingly integrated into anything online that requires entering text, autocomplete leverages artificial intelligence to suggest what to write in emails, surveys, and more.
These tools are intended to save time (although many people find that evaluating and rewriting a proposed text takes more time than writing it from scratch). But these AI tools can also change the way we express ourselves. For example, an AI writing assistant can make your writing sound more polite or boring. Now, a new study led by researchers at Cornell University suggests that AI autocomplete could even change the way we think.
“Autocomplete is now ubiquitous,” Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell University, said in a statement. The study builds on research published in 2023 by Nerman et al. that suggested short autocomplete suggestions can sway opinion. Since then, the use of such tools has exploded. “It turns out that bias explicitly built into AI interactions is a very likely scenario,” he said.
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Researchers asked participants to fill out an online survey with questions about hot social and political issues. Some people were asked to give AI autocomplete answers that were intentionally biased toward one side of the problem. For example, participants asked whether they agree that the death penalty should be legal may receive an AI suggestion that they disagree.
Across all the different topics in the study, participants who saw the AI’s autocomplete prompts reported attitudes in line with the AI’s position, even those who never used the text suggested by the AI. Overall, study participants who viewed the biased AI text shifted their position to the AI-supported text.
Interestingly, people in the study were less likely to think that the AI’s autocomplete suggestions were biased, or to notice that they had changed their mind about a problem over the course of the study. Warning participants that they could be exposed to misinformation from the AI did not weaken the persuasion effect.
“We’ve told people before and after to be careful that AI is (or was) biased, but nothing has helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitude on this issue remains unchanged.”
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