Vivid Clean
Local-first tool that strips AI watermarks and writing tells from documents, built for people who use AI as an accessibility aid rather than a way to cheat.
What it does
Vivid Clean strips deterministic AI watermarks and common AI-writing tells from documents, images and text, entirely on your own machine. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.
Why it exists
Watermarking got sold as a transparency feature. In practice it’s one signal standing in for two very different things: someone having an AI write their homework, and someone using AI as a screen reader, a spelling aid, or the only way they can get words on a page at all. Disabled and neurodivergent writers get flagged the same way as the first group. I wrote about why that’s the actual problem in AI watermarking is the new scarlet letter. Vivid Clean is the practical counterpart: a way to actually own your document instead of carrying a mark you didn’t put there yourself.
How it works
A one-time local install (Bash and Python), a small local service, and a repeatable pipeline through pandoc and a vendored watermark-removal tool. No account, no cloud step, no server that isn’t running on your own machine.