The client deliverable is due in an hour and AI wrote most of it. How do you check it fast?

Your next hour, in five steps

1. Do not start at the top. A full re-read feels safe. It catches very little, because a wrong AI sentence looks exactly like a right one.
2. List the claims that would hurt. Prices. Figures. Dates. Rules. Anything about this client's own business.
3. Flag any precise number the AI could not know. A confident percent about your client's customers is a warning sign. The AI did not have that data. It filled the gap.
4. Check each flagged line against something that is not the AI. Your price sheet. The client's real numbers. The actual rule. Fix what is wrong. Cut what you cannot confirm.
5. Ask one question before you hit send. Do I actually agree with this, or am I just tired and it sounds sure? If you cannot answer, read the main point again and form your own view.

That is it. Aimed checking beats thorough checking. Thorough, on a deadline, is mostly nerves.

Do you need an AI detector?

Many guides tell you to run the draft through an AI detector first. That answers a different question. A detector guesses whether a machine wrote the text. It does not tell you whether the text is true. A made-up price passes or fails the detector in exactly the same way as a real one.

So a detector only matters if the client or a platform has said it will check for AI writing. Even then, it comes after the fact check, not instead of it. The check that protects you is still the one in step 4: the claims that would hurt, against a source that is not the AI.

Does it say what you would say?

Facts are the first check. The second is whether the main point is yours. In the book, Jonah writes down what he will not do for money, and one line is that he will not let the machine's confident draft go out under his name as a verdict he has not formed.

So find the one sentence that tells the client what to do. Read it out loud. Would you say it across a table, to their face, and defend it if they pushed back? If yes, send it. If you hesitate, that hesitation is worth a few minutes. Rewrite that one sentence in your own words, even if the rest of the draft stays as it is.

Why your eyes slide off a clean AI draft

You spent years learning to read the wobble in people's work. A junior out of their depth writes "I think" and "maybe," and you lean in.

AI does not wobble. It writes a made-up number in the same voice as a true one. In a study of 758 consultants, people using AI on a task just past its range were about 19% less likely to get it right than people working alone (Dell'Acqua et al., Organization Science). Nothing on the page warned them.

So the check has to point at facts, never at tone.

The draft you stopped checking months ago

Here is the honest part. You did not stop checking on purpose. The AI was right a hundred times, so you checked less. Then you checked never.

In the book, Jonah drifted the same way, from editing the AI's work to just forwarding it. Then a recommendation went out under his name that was wrong, plainly and confidently, and it took the client three weeks and real money to find out.

A 2025 study of 666 people linked heavy AI use with weaker critical thinking (Gerlich, Societies). It is a link, not proof of cause. But it fits what you may feel: the instinct that used to say "this is off" has gone quiet. The fix is using it again. I trust AI with a great deal of my work. I do not trust it with the last look.

Where the book takes this further

This is the problem AI Won't Run Your Business. You Will. was written for.

The Jagged Edge: Knowing When the Confident Machine Is Wrong explains why AI is great inside its range and wrong just outside it, and why checking everything is the same as checking nothing. It gives you the Judgment Gate, four lines to fill before an important answer goes out.

The Person You Become: Don't Disappear Into the Tools is about the one question in step 5, and why approving without judging is not really oversight. Its Agency Audit shows where you have gone from deciding to only approving.

The free Judgment Workbook has the Judgment Gate ready to print. Keep one next to your keyboard. If something already went out wrong, see what to do when a wrong AI answer reached a client.