Frequently asked questions

Short answers to the questions we hear most.

How do you identify AI-isms?

We read every sentence in your manuscript and track the constructions and sentence patterns and how often they are used. Then we compare how often your book uses each one to how often real published authors in your genre do. If your book repeats patterns more often than the human range of genre fiction, we flag it.

Can't I do the same thing by just running my document through an LLM like Claude?

Not really. There are two issues: One is that there are countless AI-isms at novel length. Phrases that you don't think of as AI-isms start to become obvious as AI-isms when repeated over a full novel. Because of this, a ban list is too small, and tracking repetitive phrases in a full novel for an LLM is prone to many missed words and phrases. The second issue is that an LLM doesn't know how much is too much. It has no number to aim at. It doesn't know how often humans use phrases in real genre books. So it either misses the problem or overdoes it.

Will this make my book pass an AI detector like Pangram?

Probably not — and that's not what it's for. AI detectors hunt for the statistical fingerprints of AI text; we don't try to trick them. What we do is make your prose read less like AI to a person — the reader who picks up your book — by thinning the patterns AI overuses past the point a human notices. If your goal is specifically to beat a detector, this isn't the tool for that.

Why don't you remove all of the AI-isms?

Real authors use AI-isms, too! They just don't use them so often that readers notice them. If we deleted every single one, your book would sound stiff and strange. The goal isn't zero. The goal is normal. So we bring the overused phrases down to about how often a real author would use them, and stop there.

What's a clean pack?

Prepay for 5, 10 or 20 cleans at a lower price per book. Each clean covers one manuscript of any length up to 200,000 words, and packs never expire. You get a pack code: enter it when you order, or start your scan from the link in your email and it's applied for you. Anyone with the code can use it — share it with a co-author if you like, and keep it somewhere safe.

Why does it take so long to process?

Your book is long, and we read all of it. First we go through the whole manuscript and find every place you lean on an overused construction. Then we mark the sentences that push a pattern past the human-normal rate as tracked changes. Taking a sentence out can occasionally leave a gap — a reference pointing at something that's now gone — so a second careful pass re-reads every cut and puts back anything whose removal hurt the meaning. That's thousands of small, careful steps over a whole novel, so it can take thirty minutes or more. We email you when it's finished, so you don't have to keep your browser open and wait.

There are still a number of AI-isms over the human range in the book. Why is that?

Sometimes AI-isms are integrated into sentences that push the plot forward or are critical to the meaning of the scene. In those instances, we don't cut the AI-ism as it would hurt the actual writing itself. Note that our target for removing AI-isms is within the human range, and adding a few back generally doesn't take you out of the human range, it just moves you closer to the edge.

I noticed that one of my character names or locations was identified as an AI-ism and was removed. Why was that?

Sorry about that. It's a mistake on our end. We try to spot names and leave them alone, but if a name or a location is unusual or looks like a normal word and it shows up a lot, our checker can miss it and remove it by accident. That's why we send you a document with changes tracked. If you see a deletion you want to keep, just reject the change. One click and move on.

I don't like the edits. Can I have a refund?

If something goes wrong on our end and we can't finish your book or send it to you, we refund you. A real person checks every failed run, so it isn't automatic, but we take care of it quickly. After we send the refund, the money usually shows up in your account within a few business days. You never pay for a book we didn't make. But we don't give refunds just because you don't like some of the changes. Some won't fit your style, and switching those back is a normal part of editing. If your file comes back broken, like the wrong book or a file that won't open, that's different. Email us and we'll fix it or run it again.