Winston AI Content Detector Review for 2025

Winston AI is an AI content detector that claims a 99.98% accuracy rate in detecting AI-generated text. Designed to be used by academic institutions, businesses, and publishers, it aims to verify the authenticity and originality of any content.

Winston AI supports multiple languages (including English, French, Spanish, and others) and claims to detect major LLMs including ChatGPT 4.0, Google Gemini, and Claude – and the ability to spot paraphrased content created with tools like Quillbot. 

We put it to the test to see how it performed compared to GPTZero, our own AI content detector with best-in-class accuracy, detection of the latest models, and multilingual support. 

How Does Winston AI’s Detector Work?

Winston AI uses a map with color coding to show how predictable text is, which is the basis on which it labels it as AI-generated. This is separate from their Human Score, and both should be used together to make the best possible assessment.

Winston AI shared its research data on how it works. It explains that it has a dataset of 10,000 texts, split between human-written and AI-generated content. The human written text is taken from a broad range of sources, from Reddit to recipes to essays and news articles. 

Any data used for training has been taken from before 2021, as they believe the trustworthiness of content created after that year is largely questionable, due to the rise of LLMs from that point and the subsequent likelihood of ‘potential enhancement by AI’. The AI detector doesn’t assess texts under 600 characters as it says shorter texts cannot accurately be categorized as AI or Human (in comparison, GPTZero has a lower limit of 300 characters).

Key Features and Limitations of Winston AI’s AI Detector

Even the free version of Winston AI offers the following: 

1. Highlighting AI-generated sentences 

This feature is its ability to visually highlight and color-code sentences that were most likely to have been created by AI, which gives users a quick and clear view of where AI might have been used in the text. 

2. Free readability score

This number instantly helps you to judge a key element of content quality, which is to see how easy-to-read the content is. This gives insights into how accessible and engaging the text is, along with tips for improvement. 

3. Upload large documents

The tool supports the scan and analysis of even the largest files (including books and scanned documents), supporting formats such as .doc and .pdf which make for a smooth upload and review process.

4. (No) paraphraser function

Plenty of AI content detection tools now come with a rewriter function, but Winston AI doesn’t offer a paraphraser function. We don’t see this as a weakness as we believe in preserving human writing, but it’s worth noting as a differentiator from similar tools. 

5. (Complicated) pricing system

As we explore in more detail below – a key hurdle is that the free version doesn’t include an advanced plagiarism check. Its pricing tiers can also be a little finicky and it’s not always easy to immediately choose which plan you might need. 

Testing Winston AI’s AI Detector Against GPTZero

We asked ChatGPT to write an essay on The Great Gatsby so we could use the opening paragraph as a test. This is what it came up with:

We ran it through GPTZero’s advanced scan, which detects AI with 99%+ accuracy. Our result correctly labeled this as AI-generated.

We then put the paragraph through Winston AI’s AI detector on the free plan, and it also flagged the text as likely AI-generated, with a Human Score of 0%. As you can see, the Plagiarism check wasn’t available on this free plan.

When we put the text through Winston AI’s Advanced plan, it came back with the same results plus 0% plagiarism detection.

To get the plagiarism element tested, we had to remember to toggle the plagiarism detection feature - and small things like this make Winston slightly less easy to use. In its complexity, it aims to offer a broader range of features – but this can work against it as too many options only make for a less smooth user experience. 

Pricing adds to the potentially unnecessary complexity, as using the plagiarism detection feature costs 2 credits per word in a single scan (whereas each AI scan costs 1 credit per word).

Pricing: How much does Winston AI’s AI Detector cost in 2025?

This is where things get even more tricky. To use the tool, you need to create a free account, and you don’t have to hand over any credit card details to receive a generous number of credits (more than enough for trying out and exploring the tool). It comes with a 7-day free trial, but after that expires, you need to upgrade to a paid plan to keep using the tool (even if you have unused credits). 

Pricing starts at $12/month for the annual Essential plan, which allows you to scan 80,000 words each month for AI and plagiarism checking. However, there is no Advanced plagiarism detection in this plan. You do get that feature in the Essential Plagiarism plan, but in that plan, you miss out on Advanced AI Models Detection, Multi-language AI detection, and Paraphrased Content Detection.

This means that to fully benefit from what Winston AI claims to offer, you really need to go for the Advanced plan (starting at $19/month) – this is where you get the AI Detection and Plagiarism check. 

Compared to GPTZero which offers 500,000 credits at a lower price point, Winston AI is slightly more expensive than other AI detectors.

That said, even in the free trial, you get access to AI image and deepfake detection, which works with platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E. While we haven't yet tested the AI image/deepfake capabilities, we are encouraged to see more offerings aimed to detect AI-generated images.

Using Winston AI for longer-form texts

We tried using Winston AI for a 22,000-word novel created entirely by a human writer on our team. At first, it accurately returned it as being 100% human-written, which was encouraging – and shows that the tool can gauge authenticity even in very long Word documents. 

We then used a brand new chat in ChatGPT (which had never before been told about the novel) to generate these two paragraphs, which were stylistically quite different: 

There’s a peculiar stillness to being on a plane, a suspension of time and place that feels almost otherworldly. The hum of the engines becomes a constant backdrop, a kind of white noise that lulls you into an odd mix of alertness and calm. Strangers sit shoulder to shoulder, each absorbed in their own bubble of books, screens, or quiet contemplation… 

We inserted these AI-generated paragraphs into the document – at the top of the first page. When we re-ran the analysis through Winston AI, it still categorized the entire text (which included the new, AI-generated paragraphs on the opening page) as 100% human-written. This shows that the tool is not that accurate in reading longer documents, despite what it claims.  

For reference, here is a sample (human-written) paragraph from another part of the novel:  

To me, being a TCK means wearing a badge that denotes you are global as opposed to local, that you belong everywhere and nowhere, and that you have a mosaic of memories that can be hard to explain to people who have grown up in homogeneous cultures. From a young age, you’re also aware that there is no single definition of normality – growing up inside a melting pot shows you that truth is subjective and differences are to be respected.

As you can see, it has a very different style than what was generated by AI. This shows that while Winston AI might perform fairly well when it comes to analyzing larger documents as a whole, it doesn’t pick up on granular analysis and some parts can still slip through unnoticed, even though the test was rudimentary. 

We used the free level of GPTZero on the same edited Word document, and it gave a much more accurate response: 

Using the Advanced Scan in GPTZero, it correctly flagged the sentences that had been generated by AI in orange:   

This was a much more accurate analysis than what had been given by Winston AI. 

Final Verdict: Is Winston AI’s AI Detector worth it?

Winston AI has potential in its offering, especially for AI Deepfake detection (which we did not test in this review). It offers similar levels of AI text detection to its competitors, though its highest end pricing is a little more expensive than paying annually for GPTZero.

If you’re looking for an AI detector that can handle text as well as images, Winston AI might make sense to pay a premium for. If you are looking for the best value detector for text and scanning writing, try GPTZero.