How to Trust an AI Editing Tool: A 5-Point Checklist
If you’ve typed some version of “how to trust an AI editing tool” into Google recently, you’re not the only one. In the last year and a half, a small flood of new “AI editor for authors” tools has shown up online. A few are genuinely useful. Others amount to a landing page and a login button, put together by a team nobody can seem to name.
That distinction matters more than it might seem at first, because before you hand over a manuscript, you’re not just handing over some text. You’re handing over intellectual property, and often months or years of your own work. It’s worth five minutes of digging to find out who’s actually on the other end.
Why this matters more than it might seem
A bad editing tool wastes your time. An untrustworthy one puts your work at risk. A manuscript is unpublished, unprotected IP the second it leaves your hands, and if the company holding it has no verifiable history, no named team, and nobody to hold accountable, you’re stuck. Maybe that means a data breach. Perhaps it’s a shutdown, with your files sitting on a server nobody’s maintaining anymore. Possibly it’s quieter than that, like your writing ending up in a training set you never agreed to.
None of this is to say every new AI tool is a bad actor, or that being new is itself a problem. Plenty of legitimate companies start small and build up a track record over time. But legitimacy does leave a trail. That’s the thing worth checking for.
How to trust an AI editing tool: A 5-point checklist
Here’s a simple checklist. It won’t take long to run on any AI writing or editing tool you’re considering.
1. Is there a real About page? Not a product description dressed up to look like one, an actual page telling you who built this and why. No About page at all is the first thing that should give you pause.
2. Can you find actual names? Founders, team members, someone with an editorial or data science background you could go verify yourself. Anonymity alone doesn’t make a company untrustworthy, but in an industry built on personal creative work, being able to look someone up matters more than usual.
3. Is there a social presence, and does it have a history? An account that appeared six months ago with no activity before launch tells you something different than one with years of posts, real engagement, and an audience that predates the product.
4. Is there a track record you can verify on your own? Press mentions, industry partnerships, testimonials with actual names attached. Not just claims sitting on their own homepage.
5. Do they say what happens to your manuscript once you upload it? This one’s the most concrete, and honestly the one that matters most. Where is it stored? Who can access it? Is it used to train an AI model somewhere? Can you delete it?
None of these five checks guarantee quality by themselves. But if a company has nothing to show for any of them, that’s a company you have no way to hold accountable if something goes wrong.
Running the checklist on ourselves
We think you should be able to check us the same way we’re asking you to check anyone else, so here’s where Authors A.I. actually stands on all five.
About page. We were founded in 2020, three years before ChatGPT reached the public, by a group of 110 bestselling authors. The full story is on our [About page], if you want it.
Names. Our co-founder is Matthew Jockers, PhD, who co-wrote The Bestseller Code. Our CEO, Alessandra Torre, is a bestselling author herself.
Social history. We’re on LinkedIn and X, and we run an active Facebook community that goes back to when we started, not to whenever the product launched.
Track record. We partner with ALLi, IBPA, IngramSpark, BookFunnel, and NAIWE, and Marlowe, our analytical AI, has now worked with more than 40,000 authors.
Data. This is the one people ask about most, so we’ll be direct. Your manuscript is stored privately and processed securely. No human reviews it, nobody outside your account can access it, and we don’t use uploaded manuscripts to train Marlowe or any other model. It’s yours. It stays yours.
The bottom line
In the end, knowing how to trust an AI editing tool comes down to one question: can you actually find the people behind it? A company that can answer all five of these clearly and verifiably has given you something real to go on. One that can’t, or won’t, has told you something too.
So before you upload anything, run the checklist yourself. Check us. Check anyone. That’s really the whole point.
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