An AI detector for writers, novelists and freelancers

Writers often have to answer to detectors they don't control: a client's checker, a magazine's screening, an editor's hunch. IsThisAiWritten is a free AI detector for writers that takes a whole manuscript at once and shows which passages read most like AI. Paste a draft below, or open the file.

Why a writer would check their own work

A freelancer may have a piece bounced because a client's tool flagged it. A novelist sending pages to agents may wonder whether a clean, heavily edited manuscript will look machine-made. A ghostwriter may want to know before the client asks. In each case you already know who wrote the words. The useful question is which parts of the draft a detector might pick on, and why.

What an AI detector for writers should show you

Beyond the outcome and its confidence word, four parts of the report are useful when the writing is your own:

• Sentence map. Each sentence is shaded relative to the rest of your text, so you can see whether the higher scores sit in one section (often the most polished or most formulaic) or spread across the piece.
• Style signals. Counts of stock phrasing, paired words and lists of three, with each example highlighted. They are explanations only and not part of the verdict. You can ignore them, or treat them as a quick read on habits an editor might notice too.
• Narrative fingerprint. For fiction, features of your manuscript such as dialogue share, smell imagery and how often the narrator explains what a scene means, set beside human and AI base rates from the StoryScope study.
• Invisible-character cleaner. Zero-width characters and look-alike letters can slip in when text is pasted from the web or from other tools. The cleaner shows them and gives you a clean copy.

How to check a draft or manuscript

1. Export the draft as .docx or .txt, or copy all of it. Keep chapter headings on their own lines.
2. Paste the text or open the file in the box above. Length doesn't matter: a 208,000-word novel has been checked in one go.
3. Press Check for AI and read the outcome with its confidence word.
4. For a book, switch to the chapter view to see whether any chapter stands apart from the rest.
5. Read the passages that score highest and decide, as the writer, whether anything needs changing.

Don't edit to please a detector

Once you see a flag, it's tempting to strip out em dashes or rough up tidy sentences. Resist it. Em dashes and lists of three were human habits long before language models copied them, and they prove nothing either way (more in em dashes don't prove AI). Writing worse to dodge a statistical tool is a bad trade.

A paper trail protects you far better. Keep dated drafts, your document's version history, research notes and any correspondence about the piece. If a client or editor questions your work, those show how it was made in a way no score can.

Privacy for unpublished work

Because the detector runs in your browser, an unpublished manuscript or an embargoed article never reaches us or any third party. There is no account and no stored history of what you checked. If you want to see that for yourself, the private AI detector page shows how to watch the network traffic in your browser's developer tools.

What a result means for your own writing

Like any detector, it can be wrong in both directions, so treat a result, ours or a client's, as a reason to look closer, not as proof. Our methodology page explains how it is tested.