An AI detector for students checking their own work

If you want to see how your essay reads to an AI detector before you hand it in, paste it below. This AI detector for students is free, needs no account and keeps your essay in your own browser. Further down: how to read the result, and what to do if your own writing gets flagged.

Why students check their own work

Plenty of students write every word themselves and still worry. Their school runs a detector, and they've heard about people being wrongly flagged. That worry is fair. Detectors make mistakes in both directions.

A self-check won't tell you what your school's detector will say. Different tools use different models and cut-offs, and they can disagree about the same essay. What it can do is show you which passages read most like AI within your own text, so you know where a reader's eye might land.

How students can use an AI detector before submitting

1. Copy the body of your essay, leaving out the title page and reference list.
2. Paste it into the box above, or open your .docx file.
3. Press Check for AI. The first check takes a little longer while the model downloads to your browser.
4. Read the outcome and its confidence word, then the AI-likeness line.
5. Open the sentence map to see which passages score highest compared with the rest of your essay.
6. Whatever the result, keep your drafts and your document's version history until the grade is final.

If your own writing comes back “AI”

First, don't panic, and don't feed your essay to a paraphrasing or “humanizer” tool to beat the detector. It can flatten your voice, and you would then be handing in text you didn't fully write, which is harder to explain if anyone asks.

Look at what scored highest. Formal, formulaic passages are the usual suspects: a textbook definition, a summary of a source, a tidy concluding paragraph. If English is your second language, plainer vocabulary and textbook phrasing can look statistically similar to AI text. None of that means you did anything wrong. You can revise a passage if you think it reads stiffly, as you would for any reader, but there is no need to make your writing worse on purpose.

Then gather your evidence of process: earlier drafts, outlines, notes, the sources you read, and the version history of your document. If someone raises a concern, that record carries far more weight than any detector score. Our post on what to do if you're wrongly flagged walks through the conversation.

If it comes back “Human” or “Inconclusive”

Human means the text didn't clear the AI cut-off. That's reassuring, but it doesn't guarantee another detector will agree. Inconclusive usually means the text was too short (under 50 words gets no result, and under 150 words the confidence is always low), wasn't in English, or the evidence was split. An Inconclusive result on a short answer is not a problem you need to fix.

Using AI tools within your course rules

Courses differ on AI. Some allow help with brainstorming or grammar, while others ban it outright. Follow your course's rules, and disclose what you used where you're asked to. A detector can't tell an allowed use from a banned one, but your disclosure can.

What a self-check can't promise

Like any detector, it can be wrong in both directions, so treat a result as a reason to look closer, not as proof. It can't predict how a different tool will score your work, and it reads English only. Our methodology page explains how it is tested. Treat the result as one view of your writing. Your drafts are still your best evidence.