I Went In As a Skeptic (and I’m Still Skeptical)
When Apple rolled out their Writing Tools across iOS 18.1 last fall, I was that person scrolling through the feature breakdown thinking: “Sure, I’ll try it.” I’d been journaling consistently for three years by that point. Nothing fancy. Just the Apple Journal app most mornings, sometimes at night. The kind of honest, messy stuff you don’t share. So when these AI-powered rewriting and proofreading tools showed up right inside my native apps, I figured I’d run the experiment. Six months later, I’m sitting here with receipts from my actual journal entries, and I need to tell you what I found.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t go into this expecting to love it. I was skeptical because I already had a system that worked. But I was also genuinely curious whether these tools could improve my journaling practice without killing the authenticity that made the whole thing matter to me. Spoiler: the answer is more complicated than a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
What the Tools Actually Do (And Why I Tested Them)
Let me be specific about what we’re talking about. Apple’s Writing Tools, which expanded in the iOS 18.3 update this year, include rewrite, proofreading, and summarization features. They work right inside Notes and Journal. The big privacy claim: processing happens on your device. Your journal entries aren’t getting shipped off to some external server unless you’ve explicitly enabled iCloud sync. That matters to me, so I appreciated knowing it upfront from Apple Intelligence Writing Tools overview.
I tested three main scenarios over those six months. First, I used the rewrite feature when I felt tangled in my thoughts — those entries where I’m circling the same worry five times. Second, I ran the proofread function on longer reflections where I wanted to catch repeated phrases or unclear sentences. Third, and most interesting, I tried the summarization tool on particularly long entries. The Journal app has 12 million monthly active users by mid-2025, which means I wasn’t alone in wondering whether any of this was actually worth it.
The Retention Problem (This One Surprised Me)
Here’s where I had to genuinely update my thinking. Researchers at UC Berkeley just published findings that hit me harder than I expected. They compared traditional journaling against AI-mediated self-reflection exercises and found something sobering: the AI-assisted group retained 19 percent less personal memory detail after thirty days. Nineteen percent. That’s not a rounding error.
So I tested this against my own entries. I went back through six months of notes and compared entries where I’d used the rewrite tool heavily against entries I’d written raw and left alone. The difference was real. When I’d leaned on the AI to smooth out my scattered thoughts, something got lost. Not everything. But the specific weird detail that made the memory mine? Polished right out of it. The awkward phrasing that actually captured what I was feeling? Replaced with something cleaner but less true.
This is the part where I had to admit I was wrong about what “improvement” meant in this context. I thought clarity was automatically better. Turns out clarity without specificity is just bland.
The Authenticity Gap (According to Real Users)
I wasn’t imagining this in isolation. The Day One journaling app ran a survey in 2025 that confirmed my gut feeling at scale. Sixty-one percent of their users tried AI-assisted prompts. But only 34 percent felt the outputs were actually personal. Read that again. More than half the people tried it. Fewer than one-third thought it felt real. Day One journaling app research blog dug into why, and it mirrors exactly what I found in my own practice.
The AI tools are genuinely good at one thing: making writing more polished. They catch repetition, tighten sentences, suggest different angles on a problem. But they’re working from a template of what “good writing” looks like. And good writing and authentic personal reflection are not the same project. One follows rules. The other breaks them on purpose.
What I Actually Use Now (And Why)
So here’s my honest verdict after six months: I still use these tools. But surgically. Not as the default. Not to “improve” my morning journal pages, because that’s where I need to be messy.
I use the proofreading function when I’m writing longer reflections I might actually want to revisit or share with someone. I use the rewrite tool when I’m stuck in a thought loop and need help seeing a different angle. Not to replace my thinking. To unstick it. There’s a difference, and it matters.
I almost never use the summarization tool. That’s actually where I learned the most about what I value in journaling. When I compress something down, I lose the process of sitting with it. The summary is accurate but cold. I’d rather have the mess.
The privacy aspect is still the right call. Knowing your entries stay on-device unless you specifically sync them is genuinely comforting. It means the tool isn’t asking you to trade away your thoughts for the convenience of AI.
What I’m curious about now is how you use these tools, or whether you’re even considering it. The fact that we can do this doesn’t mean we should do it the same way. Has anyone reading this tried the Apple Writing Tools in your own journaling? What stuck, and what did you abandon? The real learning happens when we compare notes on what actually works in practice, not in theory.