a writing tool · nothing is uploaded
does this
sound like you?
every AI detector scores your draft against a general idea of what a machine sounds like. that's why they flag Hemingway and wave a chatbot through. they've never read you, so they can't tell.
this one has no idea what a machine sounds like. it only knows what you sound like, because you're about to show it.
it isn't scoringyour writing.
it's comparing
you to you.
this runs on your device. there's no account, no server and no upload, so an unpublished manuscript is safe in the box below. I can't see it either.
step one · show it your writing
paste things you've already published, or anything that really sounds like you. more is better. about 2,000 words gets your rhythm and your contractions right, and around 10,000 the fingerprint phrases stop being noise.
keep registers apart. your fiction and your work emails are not the same voice, and averaging them gives you a person who doesn't exist.
your voice, measured
this is what
you actually do
step two · now the draft
paste something new. a page you wrote with a model, a chapter you're unsure about, an email that came out stiff. it gets held against the numbers above.
what it's actually measuring
- sentence rhythm
- not the average. an average of fourteen words hides whether you write fourteens or alternate fours and thirties, and the alternation is the part worth keeping. so it shows the whole distribution, in six buckets, against yours and against 23 published novels.
- contractions
- the single biggest tell in practice. writing produced with a model runs contractions many times below its author's own rate, and the gap is large enough to see without any statistics. it's also the easiest thing to fix once you've seen the number.
- fragments and questions
- a fragment of four words or fewer, and a question mark. both are things people do and generated prose mostly doesn't, because it writes complete declarative sentences by default.
- your fingerprint phrases
- the interesting part. a phrase common in your writing isn't interesting, because "of the" is common in everyone's. one that's common in yours and rare in published fiction is a fingerprint. those are your constructions, and a draft that uses none of them is the tell nobody has a name for.
- em dashes
- counted separately, because it's the punctuation mark models overuse more than any other, and most writers have a settled rate that is not the model's.
what it can't do
it can't tell you whether something was written by a machine, and it won't pretend to. a person writing carefully in a register that isn't theirs will read the same way. what it tells you is narrower and more useful: where this page sits outside the range of the writing you already put your name to.
it also can't see a paragraph restating the one above it, which is what actually reads as generated to a real reader. no counter catches that. you have to read it.