How long should reviewing take?

Budget roughly a third of the time you saved. A draft that took thirty seconds to generate still deserves three to five minutes of real editorial attention before it goes out.

Can AI review its own output?

Partly. Asking a model to critique its draft against explicit criteria catches structural and consistency problems, but it cannot reliably detect its own factual errors.

Lesson 2: How to Judge AI Output Like an Editor

Why review is the real skill

Generating text is now free; deciding whether text is good is not. The people getting the most from AI are not writing cleverer prompts than everyone else — they are rejecting more output, faster, and with clearer criteria.

The four-pass review

Read the draft four times, looking for one thing each time. It is faster than one anxious read that tries to catch everything.

Truth. Every name, number, date, quotation and citation. If you cannot verify it in under a minute, cut it or mark it for checking.
Structure. Does the first paragraph make a promise the rest of the piece keeps? Is the order the reader's order, or the model's default order?
Substance. Delete every sentence that would still be true if you swapped the topic. Generic sentences are where AI drafts leak credibility.
Voice. Read one paragraph aloud. If it sounds like a press release and you are not writing one, rewrite the verbs.

Three failure patterns

The confident fabrication. Specific, checkable, wrong. Most common with statistics, studies and product features.

The symmetrical hedge. "There are advantages and disadvantages to consider." Balanced, safe and useless. Ask for a recommendation with a reason.

The list that never lands. Seven bullets with no priority. Ask which two matter and why.

Edit or regenerate?

Edit when the structure is right and the sentences are weak. Regenerate when the structure is wrong — no amount of line editing rescues a piece that answers the wrong question. When you regenerate, change exactly one thing (the audience, the format, the constraint) so you can tell what caused the improvement.

Building a house standard

Write down five rules your output must satisfy — reading level, sentence length, banned words, required sections, citation policy — and paste them into the prompt every time. Consistency is not a model capability; it is a checklist you supply. Tools such as AI Writer and Grammar Checker already encode part of that standard, which is why their first drafts land closer than a blank chat box.