How to check whether text was written by AI
A practical guide to AI detection, starting with the part the vendors' own pages skip: what a detector can and cannot establish, and what to do with a high score.
Step by step
- Select the passageLonger is better — under about 200 characters, no detector is trustworthy.
- Press Option+AYou get a percentage, a confidence level, and the signals.
- Read the signals, not just the numberUniform sentence length, hedging, cliché connectors and absent typos are what drive the estimate.
- Treat it as evidence, not proofDetection is probabilistic. aiCat says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Check a passage, and see the reasoning behind the number
Free to start, 10 aiCatCoins a month, short samples refused honestly.
What to do with a high score
Treat it as a reason to look closer, not as a finding. Ask for the drafting history, ask the writer about a choice they made, read the passage for the specific detail that a model would not have. Those are what actually resolve the question.
The failure mode worth avoiding is the one that has already caused real harm: a careful second-language writer flagged by a number, with no reasoning shown and no conversation had. Seeing which phrases produced the score is what makes disagreeing with it possible.
Detection is evidence, not proof — use it that way
Download for free and check something on your screen.
Frequently asked
Can AI detection be wrong?
Yes, in both directions. Non-native writers are disproportionately flagged as AI by many detectors, which is exactly why aiCat shows the reasoning instead of a bare verdict.
Which operating systems does aiCat support?
macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10/11, and Linux as AppImage, .deb or .rpm.
How much does aiCat cost?
Free to start, with 10 aiCatCoins a month and everything aiCat does included. Premium starts from $6 a month (40% off the $10 list price) and adds Think More, read-aloud, encrypted memory, 5000-character selections and 3000 coins a month. Team + Offline starts from $18 per member and adds local models, a memory you can edit by hand, and MCP access from your other tools. Coins can also be bought outright instead of subscribing, and they do not expire.