Test your AI writer against your own writing before you switch

Robbie Haas · 5 min read

You already pay for an AI writer, so the question isn't which tool ranks highest on some roundup. The real question is whether a draft can go out under your name without you rewriting it first.

That rewrite is the true price of your current subscription. You pay for the seat, and then you pay again with your own time.

Before you shop for an AI writing tool alternative, run one honest test instead of sitting through a vendor demo on a topic you don't care about. Take one piece you wrote yourself, and one draft your current tool gave you on the same subject, then put them side by side and check the same four things on both.

What to compare

Compare the two drafts on what a reader would notice, not on what a marketing page promises.

Start with whether any sentence already exists on the live web. Your own writing almost never does, but a generated draft can, and if it goes out under your name, you're the one who owns it.

Then check whether the reading level matches the way you talk. Yours does by definition, while a draft is only as close as the tool can get to a voice it has never seen.

Next, count how often the same sentence shape repeats. Your writing is varied and sometimes messy, but a generated draft tends to reuse a few shapes on a loop, and readers hear that loop even when they can't name it.

Last, ask whether you'd send it to a client without reading it first. You already know the answer for your own writing, so give the draft the same honest answer.

Score both, and if your writing passes while the draft doesn't, you've found what switching would actually buy you.

When to stay put

Keep your current tool if volume is the job and nobody reads the copy for the writing. It's the right fit for product descriptions, support articles, SEO pages that need to exist, and internal briefs, where the reader wants the information and doesn't care who wrote it.

Its real strength is that it's already in your stack, your team knows it, and switching costs you nothing. That's worth more than most comparison posts admit.

The weakness is that the draft comes out sounding like the average of what's already published. If your AI writer sounds generic, that isn't a settings problem, because volume tools are built to produce words per minute, and your name on a post isn't a words-per-minute problem.

On price, the sticker number is the small one and the rewrite is the big one. Count the time you spent last week fixing drafts, price your own hour, and you'll see what the tool really costs you.

Skip switching if you publish rarely, or you have a ghostwriter you trust, or your audience buys on product and never reads the blog. Don't fix a problem you don't have.

When to switch

Switch when the draft carries your name and you're still rewriting it before it goes out.

This suits the founder who writes under their own byline, has a point of view, and can't get it onto the page before the week closes. Your writing feeds your pipeline, and the pipeline stalls when you get busy, which is the honest case for switching.

The strength is that the checks run before you read the draft, so one report tells you whether a sentence already exists somewhere on the live web, whether the reading level matches the way you talk, and how often the same sentence shape repeats.

The weakness is that you have to feed it your own writing first and then read the report, and it won't turn out posts in bulk. That's a deliberate trade, not an oversight.

Judge the price on rewrite time rather than seat cost. If a draft publishes with a light pass instead of a full rewrite, you've bought back most of that time, and if it doesn't, you've learned that in a week rather than a quarter.

If your bottleneck is volume, this is the wrong tool and we'll tell you so.

Why detector scores don't settle it

Don't decide on a detector score. In our own testing, 18 scans of humanized output never came back above 1.9% human, and cutting em dashes from 7.8 per piece down to zero moved the score not at all.

Structure gives a draft away, while vocabulary mostly doesn't. Across 79 of our own pieces, a short corrective sentence starting with “Not” turned up in 44% of them, and the em dash everyone worries about turned up in only 4%.

So if you want a draft to sound like you, deleting punctuation won't get you there, because the repeated sentence shapes are the fingerprint and that's what you should be checking for.

Common questions

How do I know if switching AI writing tools is worth it?

Put a piece you wrote yourself next to a draft from your current tool on the same topic, then check both for repeated sentence shapes, reading level, and whether any sentence already exists on the live web. If your writing passes and the draft fails, switching is worth pricing.

Why does my AI writer sound generic no matter what I prompt it?

A generic result usually means the tool has no record of how you write, and prompting harder narrows the topic rather than the structure. The repeated sentence shapes stay, and those are what a reader registers as machine-written.

Will anyone actually be able to tell a post was AI-written?

Readers notice structure long before vocabulary. Across 79 of our own pieces, a short corrective sentence starting with “Not” turned up in 44% of them, while the em dash everyone worries about turned up in only 4%. That's why deleting punctuation doesn't help and checking sentence patterns does.

Should I trust an AI detector score when comparing tools?

No. In our own testing, 18 scans of humanized output never came back above 1.9% human, and cutting em dashes from 7.8 per piece down to zero moved the score not at all. Detector scores don't track what readers notice, so they're a poor basis for a buying decision.

I don't have time to train another tool. Is it worth the setup?

Setup means giving it writing you already own, and the time you're comparing against isn't zero either, since it's the time you currently spend rewriting drafts that came out sounding like everyone else. If a draft publishes with a light pass, you've bought most of that time back.

Still choosing a kind of tool? Five kinds of AI writing tool, compared.