The rise in AI technology has significantly changed the world of content creation, specifically writing—but videos and audio as well. Not only can you have ChatGPT and other AI chatbots help with the prewriting phase, such as outlines or brainstorming of any content you’re creating, but you can also have these same chatbots write the content for you.
As a writer or editor, you’ll undoubtedly have situations where you’ll be presented with something that’s at least partially written by a chatbot. You can usually tell straight away when this is the case, because AI-generated text has a style you can best describe as being dull and robotic.
As a writer, in pretty much all circumstances, it’s ill-advised to pass off AI-generated content as your own—that’s tantamount to plagiarism. Not only that, it’ll be flagged by tools like AI Detector, which might have implications for students, or professional endeavors where your reputation matters.
In addition, with as much AI content as there is in 2024, there may very well come a time when you need to edit a piece of it, even if you don’t typically generate it yourself. Doing so will improve the content, make it read better, and pass those AI detection tools.
Giving Yourself a Better Foundation to Work With
In cases where you create AI-generated content yourself, a great place to start—before you have to conduct any editing—is with the prompt itself. The words you provide to an AI model, such as ChatGPT, have tremendous power. Simple prompts will lead you to the bare minimum in terms of AI content. It’ll be dull, robotic, and won’t have any semblance of brand or style.
Conversely, a more detailed prompt, with specific instructions for the AI model to follow, will provide you with a much better foundation of AI content to edit. It requires a little more effort, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.
For instance, instead of a simple prompt like “write me a blog post about cybersecurity,” you can instead outline the appropriate tone, and audience, and even have ChatGPT adopt a role. Consider something like, “You are a recruiter looking to attract cybersecurity professionals through a friendly and conversational blog post about the role AI will play in the cybersecurity sector.”
You can also give chatbots your own writing, or writing you want it to use as inspiration, and the AI will try its best to emulate that content itself. It won’t be perfect, and it will still require a good edit, but it will at least get you halfway there.
Also, don’t be afraid to iterate. Considering how quickly generative AI will produce content, you can easily get it to change certain aspects very easily—and you won’t hurt its feelings by providing criticism.
You’ll quickly learn how flexible chatbots like ChatGPT are when you leverage the prompt to provide them with specific instructions. You can tell the AI just as much what not to do as what to do.
If you’re worried about how verbose the AI will be, you can specifically tell it to use fewer words, or if there’s something specific you want it not to talk about, you can instruct it for that, too. So, if there’s anything that will help the AI focus on your topic, then you can include it in your prompt.
Ultimately, your prompt can be just as long as you need it to be, and if anything, the longer, the better. And if, at first, the AI doesn’t succeed in giving you something great to work with, then try, try again. After all, it’ll cut down on the amount of editing you’ll have to do in the long run.
What Separates AI Writing From Human Writing
While you can probably make an educated guess as to why AI content can often sound unnatural, it can help to highlight and explain it in more detail. Doing so will allow you to notice where the problematic text is so that you can edit it more easily, which beats just rewriting an entire piece of AI content from the ground up.
No matter how natural a conversation with ChatGPT is, it and other AI models are still just computers. They “think” in ones and zeros, and when you read anything that they have written, this becomes abundantly clear.
AI’s Lack of Randomness
This robotic language can be explained in two concepts: burstiness (variance) and perplexity (randomness). In other words, AI writing lacks randomness in its word/phrase choices and variance in its sentence length and structure. These hallmarks are what lead it to sounding so robotic.
In addition to burstiness and perplexity, when AI writes content, it tends to lack the kind of depth and insight of human writers. Because it relies on statistical patterns rather than genuine understanding, AI-generated text often sticks to basic summaries without exploring more nuance.
What’s missing is that layer of personal experience, expertise, and critical thought that would allow a human writer to interpret information in a meaningful way. So, while AI can produce text that’s coherent and on-point (albeit in a robotic fashion), the content itself often feels a bit thin, as if it’s dancing around a topic without offering anything truly new or valuable.
Another common issue is that AI-generated content has a tendency to wander off on tangents. Even if you’ve done some fancy footwork with the prompt, AI sometimes veers into related but loosely connected ideas, creating a lack of focus. Without a clear sense of where a topic begins and ends, AI can’t always tell when it’s gone off track. If the initial instruction is too broad or ambiguous, it becomes even more likely to wander, resulting in a paragraph that reads like it’s on topic but ends up in an entirely different place than intended.
Ultimately, this combination—superficiality and a tendency to drift—makes AI-generated content feel like it’s missing a cohesive, intentional thread. That’s where editing becomes essential. By going in and tightening up the narrative, adding insights, and ensuring each sentence flows purposefully, a human editor can transform AI’s raw output into something that actually resonates with readers and holds their attention.
Step-By-Step Editing Process for AI-Generated Content
Once you’ve used our prompt tips to compose a halfway decent piece of AI content—or been sent something of varying quality—it’s time to dive in and start editing. We’ve come up with a few good steps for tackling any given piece of AI writing, but feel free to take these in whatever order you would like.
Review the content for potential cuts
Before you start changing any of the words around or completely rewriting sentences, review the text for any potential cuts. Sometimes, AI content can be a bit flowery, so feel free to cut any unnecessary adjectives or adverbs, or phrases that don’t add any value to a sentence.
AI also loves to repeat itself, especially by stating the subject of whatever topic you’re writing about. With that in mind, keep an eye out for any spots where the chatbot has reminded the reader what it's talking about. That’s nifty once in a while, but you don’t want to beat readers over the head with it.
Try to increase perplexity and burstiness
This phase of editing takes a touch more effort. Perplexity and burstiness both exist along a spectrum. While most of the time, AI doesn’t have enough, if you try to edit in too much, then it would detract greatly from readability, turning the text into a sort of word soup.
Regarding editing for variance, you can typically just rearrange the structure of a few sentences and be good. These sorts of edits very rarely require too much in the way of rewriting or difficult editing—you can just take one part of a sentence, move it to the front or back, add a comma or transitional phrase, and repeat that a couple of times a paragraph throughout the document.
Since randomness requires a bit of actual rewriting and rephrasing, it can take a bit more effort, but you can pick and choose a few sentences and be okay most of the time. Any areas that read flatly or don’t flow naturally can be a great opportunity to add a bit more perplexity to the text. You don’t have to bust out a thesaurus for perplexity; usually, rewriting a bunch of the sentences in your own words is enough.
Improve the transition and flow
AI-generated text often struggles with making transitions and flow feel natural. Improve these aspects by ensuring each paragraph or sentence flows into the next. It’s as simple as weaving in transition words or phrases so that sentences feel like part of a continuous conversation—this can also help a lot with increasing perplexity and burstiness we've also mentioned.
Improving flow is also about breaking up the repetitive sentence patterns that AI can’t quite avoid. While you’ll have done a lot of this when adding more variance to the text, keeping an eye out for these issues specifically can help everything read more naturally.
Draw from your own experiences
Since AI doesn’t have any sort of personal anecdotes to share, inserting them yourself while editing can be a great way to liven up a piece of text. Even a small story or insight can instantly give readers a connection that’s relatable and authentic. For instance, mentioning a challenge you’ve faced or a solution you found adds credibility and brings personality to the content. Even a quick, casual reference—like "In my experience, the best results come when..."—can make a huge difference in how the reader perceives your piece.
On a similar note, AI chatbots lack personality, and when they try, they can come off stilted; AI also rarely uses humor. So, look for any opportunities to insert a bit of your own style into the text. If you’re trying to align with a specific brand or style guide, you’ll want to do that while you’re putting the final touches on the text.
While these steps might seem like a lot of effort to edit AI-generated text, the ultimate goal is simply to ensure that the content doesn’t read as though it was written by a machine. During this process, some pieces of AI content will require far more editing than others, but you can keep an eye on what an AI detector is telling you.
The good news is that you don’t usually have to go above and beyond. You only have to edit it enough that it reads naturally, and if you’re looking for a bit of guidance, there are, fortunately, AI tools that can help smooth out this editing process.
How Technology Can Help the AI Editing Process
Editing a piece of content that’s written by AI can be a bit daunting, but technology can be a huge help. While it won’t do the job for you, it can definitely smooth out the process.
For starters, writing assistants like Grammarly can help with some basic editing, and typically, the tool itself won’t be detected as AI, although it does have some AI writing capabilities that might show up as AI to a detector.
That brings us to what might be your best friend while editing AI-written content: an AI detector. Since these programs highlight problematic spots in your text, they can show you where to edit, and the best ones are also highly accurate.
They’re especially helpful if you’re not sure of the origins of the document you’re editing and whether it has been completely or partially written by AI, highlighting any sentences and paragraphs that are likely to have been written by it.
For anyone trying to strip AI content from any document of anything that was (or at least reads as though) it was created by a robot, then a detector will point you in the right direction. And if you’re uncertain about any given AI detector’s results, you can always get a second opinion by scanning your document with a different one.
Putting It All Together
By the end of the process, you’ll have not only a piece of content that no longer reads as though it were written by a machine, but content that is far more effective and enjoyable to read. Though the editing process is complete, it's still advisable to give the piece of content one last proofread, especially if a significant number of changes have been made to the text. Also, consider reading it aloud. Doing so may help you catch areas where the flow falters, either because of awkward transitions or spots where the document is still repetitive.
While this might seem like a lot of effort, it’s for a good reason. AI-generated content has become so common in 2024 that a great way to set your writing apart is by giving it that extra touch that ensures it reads as though a person wrote it, which is especially true if you’re publishing your content online. Even Google has started to change how its search engine works to account for the impact AI content has had.
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, its impact will only grow and find its way into more aspects of our lives—for better or worse. And while AI is not likely to replace writers anytime soon, part of adapting to the future will be learning to leverage these tools for our own benefit, either for conceptualizing content outlines with ChatGPT or checking for AI writing with something like AI Detector.
Give it a few more years and you might not even need to edit AI-generated content any longer because it is truly indistinguishable from something a real person wrote.
