AI-generated text is now everywhere—emails, documents, posts, notes, and even quick messages. But there’s a fascinating, almost detective-style detail that few people know: many AI models — including ChatGPT — leave behind a kind of “invisible signature” inside the text. It’s made of microscopic characters that you can’t see, but that quietly reveal how the text was created.
This isn’t a deliberate watermark. It’s more like the unique handwriting of an author: a digital accent produced by the way language models assemble words. Hidden inside the text are characters like Zero Width Space (\u{200B}), Soft Hyphen (\u{00AD}), and several non-standard Unicode spaces that no human reader would ever notice, but that a system — or a trained eye — can detect instantly. And sometimes, these tiny details are enough to hint that a text was generated by AI.
The romantic part ends when you paste that text into an app that doesn’t like these characters. They can cause misaligned paragraphs, strange spacing, lines that won’t select properly, errors in CMSs, bugs in code editors, or formatting issues that make no sense. And since you can’t see them, you can’t remove them manually.
That’s exactly why Clean Text for Mac includes the “Clean” action — the Swiss-army knife of text cleaning. “Clean” is far more powerful than its name suggests: with a single click, it detects and removes the AI’s invisible signature, eliminates more than 16 Unicode space variations, normalizes punctuation, removes hidden control characters, fixes irregular line breaks, corrects formatting issues, and instantly restores the text to a clean, reliable state. You paste, click Clean, and the entire invisible mess disappears.
For situations where you only want a surgical intervention, Clean Text also includes “Clean Unicode” under the Utilities menu: it targets only invisible characters such as Zero Width Spaces and Soft Hyphens, leaving the rest of your formatting untouched.
And if you want to refine the text after cleaning, Clean Text 26 — coming this December — introduces a complete suite of on-device AI Actions. These tools let you rewrite sentences, simplify complex language, generate summaries, fix grammar, create social-ready versions of your content, adjust tone, and much more. All processing happens locally on your device, without sending your documents to external servers. You can even build custom tasks that combine text cleaning and AI-powered transformations in a single action.
A newly expanded section in the Clean Text 26 User Guide explains how AI-generated text behaves and how to manage invisible characters effectively.
Clean Text 26 will be released in December, and if you purchase the current version today, you’ll receive the license code for the new version automatically. A seamless way to ensure your text is clean, consistent, and free from every unwanted trace — visible or invisible — left by artificial intelligence.
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