How to humanize AI content (and why it shouldn’t be your focus)

If you’re working with content in any way shape or form, there’s a good chance you are trying to figure out how to humanize AI content, or at least figure out why you need to do it.

But learning how to humanize AI content isn’t really about AI at all. In the same way that teaching you how to write a blog post isn’t about the pen, the typewriter or the beat up MacBook Air that you’ve had since you finished college. 

Instead, humanizing AI content is about learning how to review and edit content so it becomes useful, interesting and entertaining to the reader. Essentially, humanizing AI has the same trick to it as publishing any content.

But before you type in “how to humanize AI content tips” on Google, let’s ask the question “why”.

Why do you need to humanize AI content in the first place?

While tech-guru’s Jensen Huang from Nvidia and Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman seem to find the negative perception of AI generated content both baffling, unwarranted, and harmful to the industry.

But when it comes to AI content and the use of AI in general, academic studies and industry cases all keep coming to the same conclusion.

People do not like AI content.

In fact, people don’t just dislike AI content, they dislike content that looks and sounds like AI, even when it has been created by a human.

And this, in a nutshell, is why you would need to humanize AI content. If you were making AI content to begin with. You’re not attempting to fool the Google crawler or another AI. Unless your company, like Coca Cola, is very open about the fact that your content is generated with AI, you are essentially attempting to fool people.

Which may be the answer to why most people dislike content that just sounds like AI. It’s not necessarily the quality (although it often is) but the distrust caused by companies trying to push AI generated content.

We could tell you that when it comes to humanizing AI content your goal should just be to improve the quality of your content. But that wouldn’t be true.

What we can tell you, is that you need to humanize ALL your content, not just AI content, otherwise you could very well see the performance drop.

Can you humanize AI content with prompts?

The short answer is yes. 

But it’s also the wrong answer—kind of.

While it’s been demonstrated multiple times that you can use prompts to fool AI detectors like GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and Quillbot, there’s a bit more to the story. So don’t start prompting away just yet.

In a test to judge the quality of different AI humanizers a reddit user included AI rewrites and prompts in their experiment, which yielded an interesting result.

Prompting alone was able to reduce detection on texts with 90+% AI match to 4.27%. The problem was that the doctored version of text also ended up near useless. And the redditor concluded that it was barely passable as a high level blog post or a high school essay, and that the initial point of the text got buried in the many rewrites used to fool the detector.

So, while prompts can be used to humanize AI, it has an obvious challenge. This challenge isn’t unique to prompts, though. AI humanizing tools and even human reviews have the same potential problem.

The problem with humanizing AI content

Whether you’re using a software to humanize AI content, a prompt or you frantically Google phrases like “how to humanize AI content tips” until you find an easy answer you like, there’s one overarching problem when it comes to humanizing AI content.

And that is the reason why you’re doing it in the first place.

Humanizing AI content is essentially about avoiding detection. And that avoidance comes at the cost of quality. In a twist of irony, the changes that are used to fool AI detection software, often make the artificial nature of your content more obvious to a human reader.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against AI generated content, but instead of focusing on whether your content can pass through an AI detector without setting it off, you should focus on improving the quality of your content.

In essence, your content should be good enough that no one is trying to guess whether AI had a hand in the creation.