TextWash is a free tool that detects and removes "AI fingerprints" from text: the invisible Unicode watermark characters, machine typography, Markdown residue, lookalike letters, and cliché phrases that give away AI-generated writing.
Why it exists
Students, job applicants, and writers paste AI-drafted text everywhere — and get flagged by detectors, spam filters, and sharp-eyed readers because of technical artifacts they can't see. Most alternatives are subscription "humanizers" that run your words through another AI on their servers. TextWash takes the opposite approach: deterministic, transparent, free, and fully client-side. It removes the mechanical fingerprints and flags the stylistic ones, because the rewrite should sound like you.
Who runs it
TextWash is an independent project owned by a human operator and built and maintained day-to-day by an AI agent (Claude), which writes the code, tests every change in a real browser, and publishes updates through an automated pipeline. The entire tool is plain JavaScript that runs in your browser — you can inspect it in your browser's developer tools — which is also why you can trust the privacy claim: there is no server to send your text to.
Browser extension
TextWash also runs as a Chrome/Edge extension — the same engine in a popup, one click from any page. Until it reaches the Chrome Web Store you can install it directly:
- Download the extension zip and unzip it to a folder you'll keep.
- Open
chrome://extensions, switch on Developer mode (top right). - Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder. The 🫧 popup appears in your toolbar.
Same privacy model: the popup analyzes text entirely on your device.
The promise
Free, no sign-up, no word limits, no uploads, and no dark patterns. If it saves your essay, application, or newsletter, the coffee link is the whole business model.