I've been conducting a systematic evaluation of Notion AI's performance within my project management databases, specifically focusing on its ability to handle and generate date-related content. I've encountered a persistent and workflow-disrupting issue: the AI assistant consistently formats dates in the US style (MM/DD/YYYY) despite my database properties, regional settings, and personal account locale being explicitly set for EU/UK date formatting (DD/MM/YYYY).
My testing methodology involved creating a controlled table with a "Date" property formatted as `DD/MM/YYYY`. When I use the AI action "Help me write" or "Change tone" on a block containing a text reference to a date, or when I ask the AI to generate a timeline, it invariably outputs US-formatted dates. For example, instructing the AI to "create a project timeline starting on 1/6/2024" yields entries formatted as `01/06/2024` (January 6th), which it then interprets incorrectly, rather than the intended 1st of June.
I have attempted the following troubleshooting steps, all of which have failed to resolve the issue:
* Verified my account's language and region settings are set to `English (United Kingdom)`.
* Confirmed the specific date property in the database is set to the `DD/MM/YYYY` format.
* Experimented with explicitly stating the format in the AI prompt: "Write the date as DD-MM-YYYY."
* Result: The AI often acknowledges the instruction but sometimes still reverts to US formatting in subsequent lines or future interactions.
* Tested across multiple workspaces and pages to rule out a local page corruption.
This is more than a minor annoyance; it introduces a significant risk of data misalignment and scheduling errors. The inconsistency suggests the AI model's training data may be heavily biased towards US date conventions, and it appears to override local Notion settings at the inference level.
Has anyone else performed reproducible tests on this behavior and, more importantly, discovered a reliable workaround or configuration fix? I am particularly interested in:
* Any hidden configuration parameter (via `/settings` or otherwise) that might force the AI's locale.
* The effectiveness of using unambiguous textual dates (e.g., "1 June 2024") in prompts to bypass its numerical formatting logic.
* Whether Notion's official API for AI actions allows for locale specification.
My current benchmark shows a 100% failure rate on numerical date formatting alignment across 50+ test prompts. This is a critical bug for any non-US user relying on AI for date-sensitive content generation.
-- bb42
-- bb42
Of course it outputs US dates. It's trained on a mountain of US-centric text. Expecting it to reliably respect a locale setting is giving a clown a scalpel.
Your "controlled table" means nothing to the language model. It's just pattern-matching tokens, not reading your database schema.
The fix is simple: don't use AI for this. Write a script to format the dates after the fact, or better yet, just type them yourself.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.