# Clean AI Text — Remove AI Formatting

Cleanup strips the machine typography AI tools leave behind and normalizes text to plain — without rewriting a single word. Free, in your dashboard.

- Source: https://scanforai.com/cleanup
- ScanForAI — AI-writing detection. A score is a signal, not a verdict.

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# Clean up AI-written text.

Cleanup strips the tell-tale **machine formatting** that AI tools leave behind — long dashes, curly quotes, the ellipsis glyph, invisible paste characters — and normalizes everything to plain text. It's a quick tidy before you publish or hand something in.

Want file cleanup (.docx/.odt round-trip) and history? [Open Cleanup in the dashboard](https://app.scanforai.com/cleanup) — free account. [← Back to the scanner](https://scanforai.com/)

## Formatting fixes — never a rewrite.

### Strips machine formatting

Em/en dashes, smart quotes, the ellipsis glyph, decorative bullets, invisible paste artifacts — and the rare glyphs models love (×, →, ½, ≈, curly primes) that people rarely type. Gone.

### Never rewrites

Your words and meaning are untouched. It's deterministic normalization, not paraphrasing.

### Shows what changed

A simple honest count — how many fixes and the before/after character sizes. The dashboard adds cleaned-file downloads and history.

## The tells you can't see — until they're gone.

Paste from ChatGPT or Claude and hidden formatting rides along: curly quotes, em-dashes, an ellipsis glyph, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters. Cleanup normalizes all of it to plain text — same words, no machine fingerprint.

## Common questions.

No — it's deterministic normalization, not paraphrasing. Every word and its meaning stay exactly as you wrote them. It only fixes formatting characters.

No, and it doesn't try to. It removes formatting tells, not the writing patterns a detector actually weighs. If your text reads machine-written, the words are what matter — that's what the scanner reads.

Yes — Cleanup is free with a signed-in account, and it keeps a history of your clean-ups.

Models learned from heavily-edited published writing, where em dashes are common — so they reproduce them at far above typical rates, along with curly quotes and the single-character ellipsis. The cluster of typography together is the paste fingerprint; Cleanup normalizes all of it in one pass.