AI Guides › Creative & Design
Using AI To Critique Your Own Work Before Anyone Else Sees It
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The usual move is to ask a tool "is this good?" and take whatever
encouraging paragraph comes back as useful signal. It mostly isn't. Asked
that way, most tools default to being agreeable, hedge everything, and hand
you a few generic compliments alongside a few generic suggestions that
would apply to almost any piece of work in the category — which tells you
nothing you couldn't have guessed yourself.
The rule: a self-critique pass only works if you ask a specific,
answerable question instead of a general one — "is this good" gets you
flattery, "does this achieve X for audience Y" gets you an actual answer.
The mechanism: the pre-review pass
- State the brief back before asking for critique. What was this
actually meant to do, for whom. A tool critiquing against an unstated
brief will critique against a generic, invented one instead.
- Ask a specific question per pass, not one open one. "Does the
opening make the argument's stakes clear in the first two sentences?"
gets you something real. "What do you think?" gets you a paragraph of
even-handed nothing.
- Ask it to argue the harshest plausible reaction, not the average
one. A reviewer, a competitor, the specific audience member most likely
to be unimpressed — naming a specific critical voice gets past the
default agreeableness in a way a general request for criticism doesn't.
- Weigh the critique against your own judgement, not instead of it.
Treat it as one more perspective to react to, the same way you'd treat
a colleague's note — useful for surfacing blind spots, not a verdict to
defer to automatically.
What to skip
Skip asking "is this good?" as a standalone question — it's the version
most likely to produce flattery dressed as feedback, regardless of the
tool. And skip running this pass on early, rough drafts you already know
are unfinished — save it for something close enough to done that specific
critique is actually actionable rather than obvious.
Guardrails
- This surfaces things worth checking; it doesn't replace a second pair of
human eyes, especially for anything going out publicly or under a
client's name — use it to prepare for that review, not to skip it.
- The critique is only as good as the brief you gave it — an inaccurate or
vague restatement of the brief produces critique against the wrong
target.
- Don't take a clean pass as proof the work is ready — it usually means
the specific things you asked about checked out, not that nothing else
is wrong.
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