iA Writer 7
iA Writer 7 review! It’s best to consider the new features in this version as non-existent.
I had high expectations for the AI detection feature… but I do not know how we’re supposed to use it.
iA Writer is actually one of the earlier writing apps, and while it has a wonderful concept, I found it lacking in functionality compared to more recent writing apps. Even in the older version 6, while the added features were good, they were tools that many other writing apps already had. However, in the new iA Writer 7 version, they have added a unique feature that I haven’t seen in other writing apps, at least up to the time of writing this.
When you paste text into the app, it can distinguish whether ChatGPT or a human wrote the text! Tools used to detect AI-written text already exist, but since ChatGPT is quite sophisticated, I’ve heard that the detection rate isn’t very high. How well will iA Writer 7 be able to recognize it? I checked it out for myself.
Table of Contents
- iA Writer 7 review! It’s best to consider the new features in this version as non-existent.
How well can iA Writer 7 recognize AI? I tried it out myself!
Actually, until this point, I had really high expectations to iA Writer 7, but…
I’ve been actively using ChatGPT lately when translating blog posts. So, I’ve been directly translating blog posts and putting some of the content into iA Writer to see if it can distinguish whether the text was written by AI or by me. In truth, having a larger sample size would be better, so it’s hard for me to claim that a simple few paragraphs would cause accurate discrimination. In truth, having a larger sample size would be better, so it’s hard for me to claim that a simple few paragraphs would cause accurate discrimination. However, with this level of understanding… I’d like to test a few scenarios and paragraphs to see how it performs.
According to iA Writer 7 official website, they recognize AI-generated text even if users copy and paste it from elsewhere. So, for convenience, I plan to copy the content into another writing app I use and then paste it here to proceed. Because of the marginalization of our Korean language in the internet world, I tested the “Korean / English” case separately. I believe that the WPML plugin I use for blog translation, which functions like a real translation program, breaks down each paragraph into sentences for translation. Therefore, I ended up listing unrelated sentences. I trust it doesn’t just recognize paragraphs and can recognize individual sentences.
I had really high expectations for iA Writer 7, to be honest. But…
I got excited and tested it with various scenarios that I could think of.
At first, I had considered several scenarios, like:
- The sentence translated by ChatGPT, plus a genuine translation of the entire paragraph.
- The sentence translated by DeepL (translator).
- The sentence I translated myself.
- Paste the sentence translated by ChatGPT directly.
- The sentence translated by ChatGPT (Korean).
- Paste the sentences translated by Google Translate and Bing AI.
I thought that by considering various scenarios like this and comparing the results for each case, it would be a helpful article. However, based on the description, it seemed like the outcome should reveal whether the pasted text was written by me or adjusted by AI, besides my writing, but the results didn’t reflect that at all. The results were just similar to simply pasting ordinary text…
At first; I thought it was impressive because there were various colors and strike throughs, but it turned out that it was just highlighting and style checking, not using the AI detection feature. So, I did some internet research and found that it’s mentioned that you need to set it as ‘Paste with AI’ when pasting, in order to use the iA Writer 7’s AI paste feature.
So, I followed that method, but all the text just turned gray… By the way, it’s mentioned that text written by AI appears in gray. However, I couldn’t take screenshots, but besides those 6 examples, there were also sentences I translated myself and parts I directly copied from ChatGPT conversations. Seeing everything just turning gray, I’m not sure if this feature works properly. If I had only written in Korean, one might think it’s a problem with Korean text. But as you can see, I’ve also written a lot in English…
I guess I expected too much from iA Writer 7 after all.
To be honest, I’m not even sure how to use this feature. Surely they don’t mean to do it manually, do they?
Instead, the style checking and syntax highlighting features stand out.
To be honest, I was quite disappointed. I believe it’s not really meant to be used manually. In the app’s settings, there’s an option to set the ‘Editor’, where you can choose between the ‘Default’ editor and the ‘AI’ editor. When I set the editor for pasting to AI, similar to the screenshot above, all my text turned gray. And when I typed a few characters there, that part appeared in black again… I really hope it’s not just a feature designed to distinguish between AI and human, but one that actually detects AI.
Otherwise, I’m really, really disappointed. Even if someone really wants that distinction, such a feature is not unique to this app at all, so there’s no need to use this app just for that… Well, then again, you might still want this feature even while using iA Writer 7.
Instead, the syntax highlighting and style checking features seemed quite useful and stood out to me. While style checking is a feature found in some writing apps, so I’ll just go along with it, syntax highlighting significantly improves readability and is a feature not commonly found in other apps, which I really liked. It’s a good app, no doubt… But why did they add this feature… That’s also proud… I really imagined that it would automatically distinguish from any article, iA Writer 7… And in fact, it seems to have this feature to some extent, but I decided not to use this version add-on.
