It’s time to accept the fact that we have all used AI writing tools to generate content at some point in our professional lives.
And why not? AI-generated text is convenient and lightning-fast. But, if we’re being honest, it can also feel bland and lifeless.
AI was always meant to be a tool—something to be wielded by humans for better outcomes. And your AI-generated content doesn’t need to, and shouldn’t, read robotic and snooze-inducing. Experienced writers and editors must spot and humanize AI-generated text, making the most of AI and its incredible benefits while preserving a human tone and voice.
In this article, I’ll share the exact strategies my team and I use to breathe life into AI-generated content. If you’re looking to elevate your use of AI writing tools by adding a dash of personality and unique humanness, you’ve come to the right place.
Let’s discover how to make AI work for you to produce human-like content.
How to Humanize AI Content: Strategies + Tools
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is AI Content? How is AI Content Generated?
AI content refers to text, images, videos, or other media created or enhanced by artificial intelligence. AI writing tools can generate articles, blog posts, product descriptions, and other forms of written content based on given inputs and parameters.
AI can also create or edit images, produce music and videos, and more. The goal of AI for content creation is usually to save time, increase efficiency, and maintain consistency.
Here’s how AI content generation works:
- Input and data collection: AI tools are fed large data sets of various writing styles, topics, and formats. This data helps AI models learn the structure and formation of different types of content
- Training and pattern recognition: AI models undergo training, during which the data is processed to learn language rules, common phrases, and the context behind different types of content
- Content generation: When you provide AI with a prompt, it uses its training material and the patterns it has learned to generate text that fits the context. It predicts what words and sentences should come next based on patterns it has learned
This process involves a combination of technologies, such as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and more.
The growth of OpenAI, a startup that introduced ChatGPT in 2020, has completely disrupted the way we approach content generation today. It owns large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4 that are capable of generating coherent and realistic content within seconds.
Yet, like all AI-generated content, it has its drawbacks.
What are the issues with AI-generated text?
Creating AI content speeds up the writing process, without a doubt; however, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Despite extensive training, AI-generated content has limitations, such as:
- Lack of human touch: This technology can generate high-quality content quickly, but will it connect with your audience? Not always. The human essence that readers relate to and engage with is often missing from AI-generated content
- AI hallucination: AI models are exposed to the risk of hallucinations, meaning they could potentially provide incorrect or misleading results. If you cross-verify everything AI generates, that might take you nearly the same amount of time to draft your content from scratch. For example, ChatGPT displays a clear warning that says, ‘ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.’
- An abrupt shift in topics: One way AI gives itself away is its obvious lack of flow. Unlike human writing, AI content often abruptly shifts between topics without providing easy-to-read and logical transitions for the readers
- Niche-specific limitations: While AI can quickly sift through vast amounts of online content, it struggles to replicate the depth of niche knowledge in a human expert. This leads to generic, surface-level AI-generated text, leaving your copy as just another piece of undifferentiated content on the web
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Is Humanizing AI Content Necessary?
We know AI content alone cannot keep your content engine running, but does that mean you abandon it? Definitely not! AI content can accelerate and even enhance your writing, and there’s no reason you should go back to spending hours or even days writing good content.
Here’s a middle-ground: humanizing AI content to suit your needs.
Doing this is necessary because:
Google penalizes websites with poor content
Google prioritizes people-first content, which means your content must exhibit expertise, offer substantial value to readers, and be centered around their needs. Additionally, Google prefers E-E-A-T content that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Although Google doesn’t specifically penalize AI-generated content, content that merely regurgitates and replicates existing material from the internet and lacks genuine expertise will not rank. To ensure your content performs well and to align with SEO best practices, you need to add a layer of human expertise and perspective.
Plagiarism
Copyleaks found that nearly 60% of ChatGPT content is plagiarized. The repercussions? It can negatively impact your SEO ranking, brand reputation, and content quality. Why would readers come to you for content when they can get it directly from the original source?
In fact, using plagiarized AI-generated content might defeat the entire purpose of content creation. So humanizing AI-generated text is key.
Enhance readability
The end goal of writing copy is to connect with your audience and address their needs. Humanizing AI content lets you add useful examples and context. Editing AI-generated content also allows you to personalize text so it’s meaningful to your readers.
Emotional impact
Humanized content is far better at conveying emotions that encourage your audience to relate to what you have to say. Human-generated content will almost always use varied sentence lengths, rhythms that mirror human speech, and even colloquialisms that enhance the flow of an article.
Most AI pieces tend to exhibit identical sentence length and structure. Humanizing this content can be particularly important in marketing, customer service, and storytelling, where audiences prize authenticity, trust, and credibility.
Brand voice and identity
Both you and your competitors can generate content using AI tools. What sets your content apart is a distinct brand voice and identity. By humanizing your content, you ensure it aligns with your brand’s values and personality, creating a unique and consistent voice.
Eliminate miscommunication
Lastly, with AI-generated text, it’s possible to miss the nuance of a complex message or miscommunicate. Humanizing the content ensures that you preserve the intended meaning and context and the message is conveyed in the appropriate tone.
Bankrate.com, a well-established financial website, effectively used AI to generate content for specific queries like ‘What Is Contribution Margin?’ and ‘What is Financial Liquidity?’ This strategy significantly boosted their traffic, with AI content bringing in hundreds of thousands of visits monthly.
So how did they achieve it?
They did not directly copy and paste AI-generated text; instead, they ensured that multiple subject matter experts reviewed and added their experiences to the AI-generated content, reflecting their expertise in the domain.
They also abided by Google’s guidelines by clearly acknowledging AI use.
Takeaway: To ensure optimal performance, humanize, review, and revise AI-generated content before publishing it on your website.
We’ve addressed why humanizing AI text is important. Let’s now take a quick look at when it is necessary.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhen Should You Humanize AI Text?
Here are a few cases where you should humanize AI text:
Marketing or branding
When creating branding or marketing material, it is crucial to ensure the brand voice shines through and you build a genuine connection with your audience.
Customer communication
When interacting directly with customers through support tickets or the customer service portal, make sure that you humanize AI text so that interactions feel personal and the customer experience is positive.
Blog content creation
When writing a blog post, humanizing content to build and engage your audience with an easy-to-read, genuinely helpful copy is imperative to make your content stand out. You also want your personality or your brand personality to reflect in your content.
High-stakes communication
Lastly, in scenarios where the message’s impact is critical or particularly sensitive—such as crisis communication—humanizing content helps bring clarity, empathy, and a nuanced, thoughtful touch. It also reduces the risk of misunderstanding.
Now, here are some tried-and-tested strategies that I’ve used to make my content sound more human, engaging, and search-intent-friendly.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Humanize AI Content: 7 Actionable Strategies
1. Pick an AI tool that works like a personal assistant
There are a host of AI tools available for different purposes. Some might help you create content from scratch, while others enhance copy that’s already written. Look for one that best suits your requirements.
The logic is simple: the better an AI tool performs, the less time and effort required to tailor and humanize AI text.
When choosing a tool, consider the type of content, language, target audience, and budget you’re working with.
For example, let’s say you are currently using the ChatGPT free model, but you consistently have to edit AI text because it doesn’t deliver contextual content that your team benefits from. This is when you try an AI tool like ClickUp Brain.
ClickUp Brain is an all-in-one solution that lets you write content, summarize lengthy texts, edit content, generate content outlines, curate engaging social media copy, and much more. It analyzes content context to offer tailored improvements and optimizations, ensuring relevance and coherence.
You can also integrate ClickUp Docs for real-time collaborative document editing. With Docs, you and your team can work on content together seamlessly.
Thanks to its integration with ClickUp Brain, Docs is perfect for experimentation and ideation. With ClickUp Brain, your document becomes a versatile playground for experimenting with various AI prompts and creating content the way you like.
If you have already written content, ClickUp Brain provides real-time insights and suggestions, helping you fine-tune your writing and make it more impactful.
2. Train your AI tool to write like you
Think of AI as a writing intern. You must train the model to generate AI text based on your expectations and requirements.
Here’s how to train your AI tool to write like you:
- Provide samples of your previous copy or articles that reflect your brand voice
- Share your style guides and enter all your unique requirements
- Iterate the prompt with more specifications to refine the content
By following these steps, the AI model will gradually be able to mimic the brand voice and tonality so your effort at humanizing content is minimized. Remember, the more detailed and explanatory your prompt, the better the results.
To minimize the effort of writing a detailed prompt, ClickUp offers AI prompt templates tailored for unique purposes. You can enter them directly into ChatGPT and get the desired results.
Here’s an example of the ClickUp ChatGPT Prompts for Marketing Template, which lets you amp up your marketing efforts with over 600 relevant prompts.
Whether you want to ideate a new marketing campaign or specifically boost sales, this prompt collection is what you need.
With this template, you can:
- Utilize effective and detailed prompts to generate AI text for Google headlines, product descriptions, call-to-action copy, and more
- Seek assistance for prompts across 40+ categories, such as branding, affiliate marketing, event marketing, Facebook ads, and more
- Write keyword-specific and SEO-rich prompts to generate high-ranking AI text
- Incorporate user persona prompt requests to encourage engagement in the generated content
⭐️ Bonus: Besides this template, ClickUp has a collection of prompts targeted at different use cases, such as ClickUp ChatGPT Prompts for HR & Recruiting Template, ClickUp ChatGPT Prompts for Product Management Template, and ClickUp ChatGPT Prompts for Copywriting Template.
3. Eliminate jargon and clichéd phrases, and use the active voice
AI-generated content often includes phrases like ‘master the art of,’ ‘in the dynamic world of,’ and ‘a tapestry of.’ Editing AI-generated content is necessary to ensure the output aligns with your brand’s voice.
Identify and replace these common terms in AI text with more natural, varied, human-like language.
For example, when I asked ChatGPT the meaning of NLP, here’s how it responded:
If your intention is to create helpful content, it’s advisable to avoid using too many technical terms or jargon that hinders the reading experience.
Scan the generated content for passive voice phrases and try to maximize active voice usage. This often makes sentences shorter and more impactful, improving readability and keeping the reader’s attention.
For instance, in the above ChatGPT-generated blog post on NLP, the intro is dry and lacks real-world examples, statistics, or a personal touch.
Here’s a potentially more human way of attempting the same intro:
‘Ever wondered how systems like Alexa, Siri, or voice bots work? NLP or Natural Language processing is the technology behind these programs. NLP makes interactions possible between humans and technology with minimal effort.’
4. Incorporating personal experiences and expertise in the domain
AI text, unlike human writing, is generic and lacks relatable experiences.
Enrich this content by adding personal experiences and expertise to make your content stand out. You are writing for humans, not machines, and humans respond more strongly to emotions than paragraphs and paragraphs of information.
Create a narrative, address the reader’s pain points, and take them through a journey with your content so they trust you and engage with it.
The purpose is simple—we aren’t only trying to provide factual details; instead, we want to reach the audience, talk with them, and help them gain a deeper insight into the subject matter.
💡 Pro Tip: Don’t forget to add quotes by industry leaders, incorporate supporting facts and statistics, and go in-depth while explaining the content’s intricacies. Make your content rich with real-world examples, address common challenges, and include humor where possible.
Let’s ask ChatGPT another question on video marketing.
Now, how can you humanize AI text by adding more value and making it reliable? Simply by adding a statistic and saying:
‘Engaging your customers with a blend of auditory and visual stimulation is a great way to capture their attention. In fact, 86% of businesses now prioritize video creation as a key marketing tool.’
5. Adding visuals to AI text to ensure SEO optimization
Another way to break the monotony of AI content is by simply adding images.
Since many people who consume content on the internet find visual content more engaging and attractive, search engines prefer it and rank it better. Exercise your creative freedom to add images, GIFs, memes, infographics, and explanatory visuals.
Optimize your AI content for SEO by adding alt text to your images. Make sure to include keywords and meta tags.
Alt tags allow search engines to scan through the images and understand their relevance; they enhance the user experience if the image doesn’t load, and finally, they are important for visually challenged readers.
SEO optimization also gives you a competitive advantage in a clustered digital content market. SEO-optimized content can continue to attract traffic and generate leads over time, providing long-term value and return on investment. Most AI tools are not able to produce content embedded with appropriate images and visuals.
6. Using AI detectors to determine which AI text needs humanizing
Here’s your last bet: directly copy-paste the AI-generated content into a human text converter and identify the sections that it flags. These sections are likely to be overly robotic and impersonal.
Let’s paste the same AI response of video marketing in Copyleaks. Here’s the result:
The content is detected as AI-generated and is flagged. Let’s now enter humanized AI content and see what Copyleaks says:
It no longer flags the content. Again, tweaking the content with a statistic and simple phrasing helped to humanize and unflag AI text.
Remember that using AI detector tools to edit your content only works when the section flagged as AI-generated is minimal. If a long document is full of AI-content flags, it may require a complete rewrite by a human.
This is where you can use ClickUp Docs to copy and paste the flagged content and receive suggestions from ClickUp Brain for improving it.
Additionally, if a team of writers is working on a content piece, using ClickUp Docs helps them collaborate in one place. They can add their inputs, suggestions, and comments in real time and get the content in ship shape sooner.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHumanize AI Content with ClickUp
AI tools can create content at scale, compile insights, and summarize research findings in a snap.
However, if your goal is to get readers to engage deeply with your content, you need to humanize AI text. Using the strategies and tools described above can give you the best of both worlds: content generated at scale and speed, enhanced by the human touch.
Choose the right AI tool so your AI-generated drafts are in decent shape. Then apply your human expertise, wear your editor’s cap, and hit ‘publish’!
Try out ClickUp’s advanced AI tool, ClickUp Brain, for your projects and experience the difference. Pair it with ClickUp Docs for easy real-time collaboration and text enrichment.
Sign up for ClickUp today and witness the magic of humanized AI content creation.
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