How to Proofread With AI Without Uploading Your Writing

Most authors now run at least some of their writing through an AI tool: a quick grammar pass on a query letter, a cleanup of the monthly newsletter, a last check of a back-cover blurb before it goes up on a retailer page. The catch is where the text goes. Most AI writing assistants send every word to a server, and for unpublished work that is a fair question. Who stores it, for how long, and could it end up helping to train somebody else's model?There is now a quieter option, and it is already built into the browser many of us write in every day.The AI model already sitting in your browserRecent versions of Google Chrome include Gemini Nano, a small language model that runs on your own computer instead of in a data centre. Because it works locally, text it processes does not need to be uploaded anywhere, and it keeps working when you are offline.A small model is not going to write your next chapter, and that is fine. Nobody should want it to. What it does well are narrow, mechanical jobs: fixing grammar, spelling and punctuation while leaving your sentences recognisably yours.A one-tap grammar fix in any text boxPI Labs makes a free Chrome extension called PI Fix Grammar that puts ...