How to Humanize AI Text

In the last year or so, AI-generated content and particularly AI writing has shot from novelty to inevitability. Robots can crank out words fast, and produce large amounts of content for free. Usually it is spammy content that Google already despises as not useful to humans. The reason is that AI writing has the personality of a tin can and is not really to be trusted. Plus, no rich human perspectives, no sparks of insights, lack of critical thinking and creativity to truly captivate readers.

Sure, machines are already helping a lot of writers, marketers, and content creators, saving them time and effort by creating sometimes surprisingly good outlines and drafts. With time their development will progress as photo editing softwares progresses to help photographers and artists. But, at least for now, nothing can substitute human writing. It will remain key for crafting content that feels alive, relatable, useful, and rewarded by search engines.

If writers wish to keep pace with this evolution and prosper, they must adapt quickly and get new skills such as prompt engineering and how to work with AI texts and humanize them. The downside: this doesn’t mean less work, but rather different work. The upside: the results will approach perfection.

So, how can one humanize an AI text?

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Human Writing vs. AI Writing

What is Human Writing?

Human writing flows directly from the human mind. It captures the depth, nuance, and sometimes even magic that only emotionally rich humans can produce. This writing feels authentic, has an unique voice, and surprises by out-of-the-box thinking, metaphors and little imperfections.

There are different types of human writing such as creative writing, academic writing, scientific writing, technical writing, business writing, personal writing and more. All of these forms contribute to people’s understanding of the vast world around them and serve as a source from which AI learns how to write.

What is AI Writing?

AI writing is generated by artificial intelligence models through machine learning techniques. It uses vast data to identify patterns and produce human-like content. However, AI writing lacks the true creativity, emotional depth, and authentic voice that characterizes human-written pieces.

Here is a small summary of the main differences between AI and human writing:

	Human Writing	Artificial Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence and Creativity	Humans deeply comprehend the nuances of life and express ideas.	AI lacks the ability to express its own feelings.
Contextual Understanding	Humanscan add sarcasm, irony and satire to their content.	AI has limited ability to understand language nuances and cultural context.
Experience and expertise	Humans can  enrich and captivate their work by sharing personal experiences, know-how, and expertise.	AI can only provide information based on the data it has been trained on.

Why Should You Humanize AI Text?

Recently, the internet was flooded with content entirely written by AI (also known as ‘one-click content’), which led to a decline in the quality, authenticity, and diversity of information available online. This content brought ethical concerns about the lack of human oversight and the proliferation of misinformation or biased content. As a result Google’s 2023 Helpful Content Update was focused on the importance of content quality and oversight.

So, you want to humanize your AI texts if you aim to create a more engaging and relatable experience for your audience. Here are a few reasons why you should do it:

• Has a potential to improve SEO and search engine rankings, as they favor natural, high-quality content that resonates with users.
• It adds personality and warmth to the text, making it feel more human-like and less robotic.
• It helps build stronger connections with users, as they can relate to the tone and language used.
• It improves the overall user experience, making interactions with AI systems more natural.
• It can enhance brand perception, as the humanized tone aligns with the company’s personality and values.

How to Humanize AI Text?

Rule number one is to treat everything that AI writes as a draft. Then approach it by deciding on the overall tone of voice and language you want to use, and work paragraph by paragraph to edit it.

You may have noticed that AI tends to use words that sound like clichés such as “rapidly evolving” or “harnessing the power”. The first thing to do to humanize AI text is to try to avoid overusing such cliché-sounding words and make the text sound more natural.

Simplify the Language

AI prioritizes AI-friendliness over human-friendliness. It selects words from the vast vocabulary available on the internet. If you don’t know how to prompt it to use a certain tone of voice and language, you will end up with words like “contented” instead of “happy.” And even if you know how to prompt it you cannot leave it without human touch. Simplify the language and be sure it is understandable for humans.

Add Context

AI can generate text on a topic, but may not understand the specific context or target audience. In marketing, content needs to be written with the users in mind.
To add context to AI-generated content, edit it with your reader in mind. Or, give the AI an outline that includes context details like the purpose and audience for each section it needs to write and then edit it.

Use More Contextual Language

You can prompt an AI to use jokes, but they may lack sensitivity, cultural nuances, and may not feel funny in the context of your text. However, anecdotes are a universal language and one of the most effective ways to emotionally engage your readers, which is lacking in AI-generated text. Adding humor will make your content more enjoyable and interesting.

Share Personal Experiences

AI doesn’t possess human empathy and cannot connect at this level with people. But humans love and connect better with content based on personal experience. Sharing authentic and original stories is not in the capabilities of robots, so add some personal touch, explaining real-life situations during the editing process.

Add Expertise

AI produces anonymous texts. However, demonstrating expertise is important not only for readers, but also for Google. In fact, one ‘E’ in their E-E-A-T framework stands for Expertise. This means it’s a big plus to demonstrate qualifications and expert status. Sharing other experts’ perspectives, adding sources, and including author information all contribute to this. Responding to the question “Who is behind the content?” matters also for SEO as Google aims to provide the best experience to its users, and expertise matters to users.

Support The User Journey

The primary focus on SEO is targeting the audiences and delivering quality content using strategically keywords that resonate with user’s search and intent.

But the big difference is that AI writes for search engines and stuffs texts with keywords, leading to dull content. Humans, on the other hand, write for humans, balancing the content with the best SEO practices. While editing, user experience should be your first priority. This means you have to deliver the best quality content, keeping in mind user intent and reducing the risk of keyword stuffing.

AI Text Humanizer: Using AI for Humanizing AI Text?

AI text Humanizer tools as well as AI checkers are not developed yet to the point when they can actually be helpful and trustworthy. But, if you want to try, there are AI Humanizers that claim they “humanize” AI texts such as Bypass GPT, HIX Bypass, Humbot, Undetectable AI and more.

The issue with such tools is the same as with the AI itself. You cannot skip the number one rule to treat all AI texts as drafts to edit, but such tools can be useful to some extent. For instance, if you don’t have the ability to write as a human they might give rephrased options.

The same is true for AI detectors. In theory you can use them to “check” if your text sounds human or not and try to humanize it where sections are highlighted. There are plenty of them but even those that claim to be “the best” or “the most acurate” can give results, ranging from 0% to 100% chance of AI involvement for the same text.

Remember the curious case of the U.S. Constitution, which was attributed with a 94% probability to ChatGPT? AI can flag as AI a text just because it is written well. According to a research of University of Maryland even the best-possible detector can perform only marginally better than a random classifier. And according to a research of Cornell University, AI is biased against non-native English writers. So, at least for now we suggest not relying on artificial intelligence to evaluate how ‘human’ a text is or humanize it for you. Only humans can humanize text.

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Wrap Up

Why bother with AI in the first place if you will have to do so much work to humanize AI text? The choice is up to you, but the inevitability of AI is here. If used the right way, as an assistant to generate ideas, outlines, and drafts, it can be extremely beneficial for the quality of your content and maybe even save you some time. Try and time will show.