Businesses increasingly use AI to draft and edit content – blog posts, case studies, training outlines, policy documents, contracts, presentations and more. I heard about a life-writing company that uses AI to ghost books based on an interview transcript, and only brings in a human to edit and sense-check the final draft.

Many may deplore this direction, but it’s rapidly becoming new work for writers. Rather than create from scratch, people take AI drafts and ‘make them human’. This requires a slightly different skillset to that required of a traditional content writer.

At least businesses understand AI content alone won’t cut it. In fact, the request is often just that: ‘make this sound like it’s not AI’. Everyone’s using it, but no one wants to be caught doing it. So how do you ‘humanise’ AI content?

Get rid of the obvious telltale AI icks

Nothing wrong with an em dash in its place, but the likes of ChatGPT use them to excess. Other telltale signs include the gratuitous use of emojis and a number of cheesy almost cliche constructions. For example: ‘The result? Increased sales, and a delighted client.’

Another would be the overused ‘Not X but Y’ pattern. As in: ‘This isn’t just an upgrade. It’s a whole new experience.’ And another would be colons in titles, e.g. Humanising AI: Best Practices for Editors.

AI loves clusters of three, too, often alliterated. Bots overdo it. As in: ‘This is a huge improvement, and it’s all down to Acme plc’s enthusiasm, experience and expertise’.

Look out for words that AI can’t resist. These tend to be words you’d never use yourself, such as ‘delve’, ‘amplify’, ‘leverage’ and – oh dear Lord, it’s everywhere – ‘spearhead’. There’s good tips here and a brilliant big list here.

Review structure and syntax

Structure is complicated, but AI likes to think it’s easy. It likes to construct a piece as a simple list of points 1>2>3>4>5, for example, whereas a more interesting human approach might be something subtler such as 5>1>2>3>3.1>3.2>4>4.1>4.2>4.3>5 revisited. This simplistic approach to structure is underlined by excessively repetitious sentence lengths and a slavish application of transitional and linking phrases such as ‘moreover’, ‘consequently’ and ‘furthermore’.

Remember that AI tools are designed to convey plausibility. Not truth, but truthiness. Sometimes when you spend a long time with an AI text you start to spot whole sections that are redundant, repetitious or completely out of place. Look at tone and cliche

Look out for dead language and cruddy business metaphors. AI is always talking about ‘paving the way’ or ‘embarking on a journey’, about ‘today’s fast-moving digital landscape’ or ‘our complex, rapidly-evolving global economy’. Attempts at empathy begin with hollow expressions like: ‘It’s important to note that…’

These issues are connected to the wider issue of tone. AI tools work hard at it, but tone is a fuzzy thing where humans clearly have the upper hand. If you work regularly for a brand or business, for example, you’ll have an instinctive sense of the words and phrases it would use or avoid – whether your brand would say ‘gifts’ or ‘pressies’, say, or whether your CEO is a ‘your sincerely’ or an ‘all the best’ kind of person.

Real-world ignorance

AI tools are famous for ‘hallucinating’. One example I saw just recently came from entrepreneur Brad Feld, who confronted the latest version of the AI tool Gemini about erroneous facts it had provided him on the subject of… Brad Feld. Hilariously the AI ended up groveling for making stuff up.

So again, ignore how plausible the words sound. Check how they measure up to your knowledge of the real world. Check facts and stats. Try injecting some first-person pronouns and real stories. You can find more good advice here.

Humanity

When I look at AI-generated content that has been generated from a human input I’m familiar with, such as a talk or an interview, I often find all the interesting bits missing – the touches of humour and opinion, the verbal flourishes, the little anecdotes that bring warmth and context.

Put those back in. Add in some quirk and mess and surprise. Perhaps, just perhaps, the machines haven’t quite taken over yet. Sure you can tell human language from AI writing? Check your skills with these quizzes.

BIO – Dan Brotzel’s latest novel is Thank You For The Days (Bloodhound Books). He also writes widely on Medium.