Guide/ before you move a draft
What to look for in an AI writing tool.
Every one of them can write. The question worth asking before a draft goes into one is narrower — when you ask for a change, what comes back: the passage you meant, or the document again?
What is an AI writing tool?
Software that drafts, edits or rewrites text with a language model behind it. Which model it runs matters less than people expect; what changes the work is where the model sits relative to your draft — in a thread you paste into, or in the margin beside the paragraph.
Four questions to ask of any of them
01Can you point at a sentence, or do you have to describe it?
A thread holds no draft, only your account of one. You paste the excerpt, explain which part bothers you, and find out afterwards whether it read you the way you meant.
In Remark a remark carries the passage with it, so the model is never told which sentence you meant. It is shown.
02What comes back: the passage, or the whole document?
Ask a chat to fix one paragraph and it answers with the file. Three paragraphs you were happy with have been improved on the way past.
Every paragraph you did not mark comes back character-for-character identical.
03Where do the versions live?
Scrolling a thread is not version history. Tuesday’s good opening is in there, above forty answers, and finding it costs more than writing it again.
Each version is a place, with the name you gave it.
04Does it remember how you edit?
A new thread begins knowing nothing about what you consider wrong, so your taste gets explained again, in full, every session.
Remarks pile up into principles, and those go into every rewrite that follows.
Does Google penalise writing done with AI?
No, and it has said so in writing.
“Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies.”
The bar is whether the page is worth reading, not which software touched it.
Which model should it run?
Whichever you already trust. The three makers publish what theirs can do, and that page is a better answer than a paragraph we would write about them — Claude, GPT, Gemini.
In Remark the choice is per project, and your remarks travel with you.
The rest of it — the margin, the versions, the projects — is the tour on the home page.