Essay AI Checker for Students 🫧

Wrote it yourself and still worried about getting flagged? See the mechanical tells AI detectors key on — hidden characters, machine punctuation, formatting residue — and strip them before you hit submit.

🔒 100% private — your text never leaves this browser tab

📝 Your text

🔍 Fingerprint report

paste text to scan
Findings will appear here. Invisible characters are shown in red, typography in amber, style tells in blue.

👁️ X-ray view — invisible characters made visible

Your text with every hidden character exposed will render here.

Why was my essay flagged as AI when I wrote it myself?

AI detectors get human writing wrong often enough that most vendors publish a false-positive rate — and some of those false positives are purely cosmetic. Word processors auto-replace your straight quotes with curly ones and your double hyphens with em dashes. Grammarly and Docs suggestions insert professional typography. A quote pasted from a website drags invisible Unicode characters — zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces — into your document, where they survive every subsequent copy-paste. None of this means you used AI. All of it makes your essay look machine-produced at the character level, because these are exactly the artifacts AI output is full of.

What to check before you submit

Paste your essay above. The fingerprint report names every suspicious character by its Unicode code point, the x-ray view shows exactly where each one hides, and the grade tells you how machine-flavored the text reads overall. Then one click washes out the mechanical tells: invisible characters deleted, curly quotes straightened, em dashes and real ellipses converted to what a keyboard actually types, stray Markdown symbols stripped. Your words are never touched — the diff view proves it. And because everything runs locally in your browser, your unsubmitted coursework is never uploaded anywhere.

What this tool won't do — and why

TextWash is not an AI detector and not a "humanizer." It won't tell you whether a detector will pass your essay, and it won't make AI-written text undetectable — statistical detectors read word choice and sentence rhythm, which no character-level tool can change (and which we deliberately don't try to disguise). What it does is narrower and honest: it removes the mechanical artifacts that can get hand-written work flagged for cosmetic reasons — the same evidence your grader can see. If you wrote the essay, this is housekeeping, not deception. Keep your drafts and version history too — they're the strongest proof of authorship there is. Curious what these artifacts look like in the wild? See what's hiding in AI text.

FAQ

Will this make an AI-written essay pass AI detection?

No, and it doesn't try to. TextWash removes mechanical fingerprints — hidden characters, machine typography, formatting residue. Statistical detectors also analyze word choice and sentence rhythm, which no character-level tool changes. If AI wrote your essay, this won't disguise it; if you wrote it, this removes the cosmetic artifacts that trigger unfair flags.

Why do AI detectors flag essays that students wrote themselves?

Detectors are statistical and have documented false-positive rates — formulaic prose, non-native English and heavily edited text all get misread. On top of that, Word, Google Docs and Grammarly insert curly quotes, em dashes and hidden Unicode characters that make hand-typed text look machine-produced at the character level. TextWash shows and removes that second, fixable category.

Is it safe to paste my unsubmitted essay here?

Yes. The page is plain JavaScript with no backend: your essay is analyzed entirely in your browser and never uploaded, stored or logged. Nothing you paste can end up in a database or a training set.