As we all know it Winston AI is one of those AI detection tools that claims to accurately detect whether a text is written by a human or by an AI. However, does it really do what it says? The short answer is YES, it does a decent job at it. The longer answer is the devil lies in the details. Keep reading to know more about it.
Why Winston AI’s accuracy is important?
Many people trust this AI detector as is evident from their over 700K monthly visitors (May 2025 data) on Similarweb. People don't use it if they don't trust it.
Since they have gained some authority in this space it is important to question it and see if it is reliable enough. Also, some people tend to overly rely on these AI detectors and wrongly accuse people of using AI-generated content.
Dataset at a glance
We tested Winston AI on a dataset of 160 text samples:
- 82 of them were truly written by AI (around 51%)
- 78 of them were truly written by a human (around 49%)
Each row in the dataset had the free-text, a ground-truth label (Written By), Winston’s predicted label (Winston AI Detected it as), and a numeric Score between 0–100. Now, this score basically indicates how “human-like” Winston thought the text was. Low scores are near AI predictions (the median AI-score is about 0.54) while high scores are near Human predictions (the median Human-score is about 99.4).
Also Read: Can Winston AI detect Quillbot?
Our summary metrics
Below is the table which will make things clearer:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Accuracy | 0.7938 |
| Macro Precision | 0.8190 |
| Macro Recall | 0.7972 |
| Macro F1 | 0.7908 |
| ROC-AUC† | 0.8429 |
Interpretation
Accuracy ≈ 79% – Out of 160 texts, Winston AI was correct on about 127. That’s definitely not perfect but it is better than random guessing.
Macro Precision = 0.82 – Whenever Winston AI claims a text is “AI” or “Human,” it is correct about 82% of the time on average across both classes.
Macro Recall = 0.80 – Winston AI manages to find around 80% of the actual AI texts as well as about 80% of human texts.
ROC-AUC = 0.84 – If you treat Winston’s Score as a continuous indicator, it separates AI-written from human-written text quite well. Random guessing would yield 0.50 in that metric, so 0.84 is not too shabby.
Also Read: Can Winston AI detect ChatGPT?
Confusion matrix
Below is the confusion matrix for a more granular view:
| Predicted AI | Predicted Human | |
|---|---|---|
| Actual AI | 54 | 28 |
| Actual Human | 5 | 73 |
High precision, modest recall for AI
Winston gets a high precision of 0.92 for AI content. This basically implies that it rarely mis-labels human text as AI (only 5 false positives). However, it misses about 28 AI-written pieces. That means its recall for AI is 0.66, indicating that a good chunk of AI text slips through and is labeled as human.
Opposite pattern for Human content
The recall for Human class is 0.94, so Winston almost always identifies human text correctly – only 5 human texts are predicted as AI. That’s good if your main concern is that your genuine writing might get flagged incorrectly.
Threshold behaviour (for those into details)
We have labeled texts as “Human” if Score ≥ 50%. If you increase the threshold to, say, 90%, you’ll reduce the chance of missing AI content but you’ll also risk labeling more genuine human texts as AI. The aforementioned AUC figure (0.84) suggests Winston can actually shift this threshold depending on how much risk you want to take.
One single opinion that is useful
If you ask me, Winston AI is good enough if you want a quick check to see if the text is probably AI or not. It rarely flags a genuine human text as AI (only about 6% false alarm for humans). But if your main objective is to catch every single AI-generated text out there, Winston might not be bulletproof because it misses quite a few AI texts.
The Bottom Line
Winston AI might not be spot-on 100% of the time, but if you are mostly worried about genuine human writing getting flagged incorrectly, Winston is actually pretty fine. At the end of the day, no AI detector is flawless. They are all evolving, and so is the AI writing. This is basically a cat-and-mouse game that will get more interesting as time progresses.
