In such a surprisingly short amount of time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives. We can use tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to help us with a wide range of tasks, from researching topics to helping create outlines for written pieces of content.
You can also use these AI tools to generate content for yourself in a flash, which is especially helpful if you’re in a pinch and unable to write something from scratch. The only downside to this is that trying to pass AI-generated text as your own is tantamount to plagiarism—not to mention how robotic AI content can sound.
Fortunately, there are a few reliable ways of humanizing any AI content to ensure that each word and phrase reads as though a person wrote it. Often, doing so will ensure that even if a chatbot wrote the bones of your content, it reads as though a human was behind the wheel, and not a chatbot.
In this article we’ll be exploring a few different methods of humanizing AI content. While most of them will focus on after the text has already been generated, we’ll be starting with something that you can do before that even happens.
Improve the Prompts for Better Results
Though you might not realize it, you can do some pretty fancy stuff with the prompts you give to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT. Sure, you could instruct the AI to write you a 1,000-word article on any number of topics, from technology to AI itself. Doing it that way will lead to the robotic language that you’re probably all too familiar with if you have previously used ChatGPT or another chatbot.
Instead, you can enhance your prompt with some specific parameters about your desired tone and audience, and the results will be a lot more human. In addition to this, ChatGPT will actually learn your writing style if you supply it with enough of your own content—although this takes a lot—so if you’re a seasoned and prolific writer, you can get a more human output that way, too.
However, while tweaking the prompts can provide great results, you’ll probably still have content that has parts that read like a robot wrote them. You’ll need to humanize those parts yourself—but fortunately, we have some tips for you.
Ways to Humanize AI Content
If you’re trying to take the robot voice out of your text, a great place to start is with a high-quality AI detector. The good news is that there are a lot of highly accurate tools out there that will have no problem recognizing any obviously AI-generated text.
These tools are great because they work in a similar way to how the AI chatbots themselves work, through a large language model (LLM) that assists in how they are able to deconstruct writing and reproduce it themselves. The downside is that, ultimately, they are artificially reproducing what we are capable of doing. That’s why, so often, AI-generated writing still doesn’t quite hit the mark.
Outside of how they work, AI detectors will highlight any sentences or paragraphs that are likely to be AI-generated. If you’ve uploaded a document that uses a simple prompt, and just let the chatbot go to work, there’s a good chance that a good AI detector will highlight all of them. However, if you’ve uploaded something that was only partially generated by AI—or if you did some fancy stuff with your prompts—then maybe you only have something that a detector marks as 40-60% AI-written.
It’s Time to Edit
Once you’ve got a good idea of which sentences need a bit of humanizing, you can do some rewriting to make sure they don’t sound like a robot wrote them. Going this route will naturally take a bit of effort, but it’s the most surefire way of humanizing AI content, since it doesn’t get much more human than a person!
Here are some things you can do to humanize AI content on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence basis:
Increase perplexity and burstiness
Where AI writing is concerned, burstiness and perplexity are traits that most chatbots don’t do too well. Put simply, most AI models write in such a way that they lack variance in their phrasing and sentence structure. If you take the time to read anything generated by a chatbot, you’ll notice that a lot of the sentences and paragraphs have a similar rhythm. Sentences and paragraphs tend to have similar structures and lengths. So, it’s important to mix it up. Edit the AI content in such a way that you increase the variance in both sentence length and structure.
Add some empathy and emotion
As you can imagine, chatbots lack both of these things, and although they can sometimes fake it with specific enough prompts, nothing quite beats authentic empathy and emotion. So, rewrite or expand any sentence to include more emotions—human touches and clever wordplay are also telltale signs of human writing.
Improve the flow
While chatbots can create pretty decent sentences and paragraphs, they can’t always nail the transitions between them. So, a great way to humanize AI content is to go from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph and ensure that everything flows well. This can include simple words and phrases to help link together sentences, or it can involve creating a thread through each thought and idea to ensure that there’s no sign of choppy, robotic language.
Draw from your own experiences
When an opportunity arises, a great way to humanize your content is to insert anecdotes based on your personal experiences. This option is great on a case-by-case basis, but naturally, not everything you write will be suited to personal stories about yourself.
Throw in some cliches, idioms, and slang
While colloquial language can enhance your writing and make it a little more interesting to read, you should avoid relying too heavily on these figures of speech. A few of them here or there can be great, but if you overdo them, it can detract from the overall readability and flow of your writing.
While these kinds of revisions can take some time, they are a surefire way of taking AI content and humanizing it in such a way that means it’s unrecognizable from the words of a robot.
An Example of Humanizing AI Content
To give a real-life example of the kind of humanization we’re talking about, here’s an excerpt of text we had ChatGPT write and then used an AI detector to scan:
“Humanizing AI content involves making it more relatable, authentic, and engaging to the reader, ensuring it resonates on a personal level. This can be achieved by infusing conversational tone, storytelling, and emotional appeal into the AI-generated text. Incorporating human experiences, empathy, and context-specific insights makes the content feel less robotic and more tailored to the audience’s needs. Additionally, aligning AI outputs with human values, cultural nuances, and natural speech patterns helps bridge the gap between machine-generated and human-written content, creating a seamless and relatable experience for readers.”
Image credit: GPTZero.
As you can tell, it is clearly generated by an AI model, and it’s arguable that the content itself is actually any good; that last sentence is, in a word, gobbledygook. But it’s good enough for an example. For reference, we used a simple prompt: “Would you provide me with one paragraph about humanizing AI content?” This was also done in a new chat, with no previous memory or history.
When humanizing this text, we aimed to keep the overall message similar, just rewriting and editing it enough so that it would no longer be detected as AI-written text. Here’s the rewrite:
“When you humanize AI content, you’re removing the robotic language known all too well from AI chatbots and revising it so that it reads more like a real person wrote it, with empathy, authenticity, and relatability. Accomplishing this task can be done by giving the writing a more conversational tone, adding some personal anecdotes, and ensuring that you’re writing to a specific audience. Next to that, you can also adjust the AI prompts themselves with specific instructions to add a lot of these features to help bridge the gap between AI-written and human-written content.”
And voila, it no longer has any signs of AI-generated content:
Image credit: GPTZero.
Understandably, going systematically through a document and humanizing it piece by piece yourself can be a time-consuming endeavor, even if the end results are worth it—and they truly are worth it. No matter what you’re writing, or for whom, you never want to publish or submit AI-generated content.
The good news is that the same technology powering both AI chatbots and detectors can also help you humanize machine-generated content with ease.
Using AI Humanizers to Do the Job for You
Back to the subject of AI detectors, they work by learning (through one of those large language models) what AI-written text looks like and what human-written text looks like. Once they’ve done that, they are able to analyze content and decide which of the two it most resembles, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph.
Naturally, any model that can intrinsically learn what each type of writing looks like can also learn how to turn one into the other. That’s why a lot of the developers of AI detectors have also leveraged those same technologies to create automatic humanizers. These tools will scan your text for any signs of AI-generated sentences and replace them with a more humanized variant.
Granted, this is still—in a way—using a robot to do a human’s job; however, depending on the AI humanizer used, the results can be pretty effective. It’s still a good idea to run the output through an AI detector to check how much of it scans as being computer-written.
Also, since a lot of these AI humanizers are built by the same companies that make AI detectors or other tools, we also recommend getting a second opinion and running your AI-humanized content through multiple detectors to ensure that they seem human enough. A manual revision or two can also be extremely helpful.
The Bottom Line
With how prevalent AI has become over the last two or three years, it’s highly likely that you will run into some AI-generated text that you either created yourself or were sent by someone else.
Often, you’ll have no other choice but to humanize it yourself, using a bit of editing and revising—or drastic rewrites in some cases—or by using an AI humanizer.
Either way, a detector, like AI Detector, can be invaluable for humanizing AI content. A detector can help you highlight any problem areas, so you can find out exactly which portions of your text need to be humanized, and if you’re using an AI humanizer, they can tell you how good of a job it did.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to humanize AI-generated content?
Humanizing AI content involves taking text that sounds like a robot wrote it, and rewriting and editing it so that it reads as though it came from a human, typically so that it passes an AI detector. Proper humanization isn’t simply just about changing a few words here or there—it’s about ensuring the text has a lot of variance and flows well.
Why should I bother humanizing AI content?
Let’s face it, AI-generated content can often sound a bit stiff and mechanical. Humanizing it helps ensure that it flows naturally and creates an engaging connection with the reader. Outside of that, with how prevalent AI-generated content has become, ensuring what you write reads as though a human wrote it is paramount.
Can AI learn my writing style?
Yes, AI models like ChatGPT can pick up on your writing style if you feed them enough of your work. It’s not perfect—there’s still a good chance you’ll need to tweak the output, but it can definitely help in producing content that sounds a bit more like your natural writing style. Going this route can be a great way to humanize AI content right from the onset.
How can I tell if my content reads like a chatbot wrote it, even if it didn’t?
You can use an AI detector to scan your text and highlight any parts that seem AI-written. These tools break down your content sentence by sentence, flagging parts of it that align with the telltale AI signs. That way, you’ll know exactly where to focus your editing efforts.
Are there any tools to humanize AI content automatically?
Yes, there are tools designed to humanize AI-generated content by rewriting sentences that sound too robotic. While these can help save time, you’ll still want to give it a once-over yourself to make sure everything sounds as natural as possible. After all, when it comes to good writing, nothing beats the human touch.
Can I fully rely on AI to humanize my content?
AI tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s important to remember that they’re not perfect. You’ll still need to go through and make sure the content has the markings of something written by a human. AI is a helpful assistant, but it does not replace human insight and creativity.
What are the risks of using AI-generated content without humanizing it?
Publishing AI-generated content without humanizing it can make it seem cold and robotic, which might turn off your readers. Worse, it can be flagged by AI detectors, which could hurt your credibility. If you’re a student, it can also lead to failing grades and accusations of academic dishonesty. Humanizing the text ensures that it both resonates with people and passes AI detection checks.
How long does it take to humanize AI content?
While it can vary depending on the amount of editing required, it shouldn’t take too long. Light edits may only take minutes per page. However, if the content reads as though a computer wrote it, expect to spend more time rewriting it. Either way, the more time you take to humanize AI content, the better the results will be.
