How to Humanize AI Content: Strategies for Authentic Engagement

AI-generated content can help you save time when creating the many different kinds of writing you need for your business. At the same time, content produced by generative AI can be flat or boring and provide a shallow analysis of the concepts you want to be a thought leader on. However, you can learn how to humanize your AI-generated content to turn dull and bland work into engaging pieces that demonstrate your expertise. 

According to a 2024 survey from SurveyMonkey, marketers often use generative AI for a variety of tasks [1]:

• 50 percent use it to create new content like blog posts or social media posts

• 51 percent use it to optimize content

• 45 percent use it to brainstorm content ideas

• 40 percent use it to conduct research

• 41 percent use it to analyze data

• 43 percent are using it to automate tasks and processes 

With all these ways you can use generative AI, it’s important to understand how your AI strategy affects both your brand message and how your customers receive it. 

Why is it important to humanize AI content?

Humanizing your AI-generated content is important because you want it to be engaging to humans while making fair claims and providing accurate, helpful information to your audience. 

It’s also important to use content that sounds human for search engine algorithms that prioritize content demonstrating E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. 

You won’t need to follow a specific formula to write content that appears at the top of search results; instead, you should strive to create people-first content that offers useful information and helps searchers answer their questions. To do this, you’ll need to improve your AI-generated content to ensure the search engine reads it as original, unique, and high quality. 

How to humanize AI content 

You can humanize your AI-generated content and make it more authentic and engaging by looking at the patterns in AI-generated writing. By fixing these quirks into a more natural narrative that resonates with your audience, you can deliver a stronger piece of writing while still using AI tools to help you save time. 

You can use numerous methods to make AI-generated content sound more human. 

Vary your sentence length and structure.

You can vary the length and structure of your sentences to make your work sound more like a human wrote it. Generative AI works by recognizing patterns in human language found in its training materials. This training means that the generative AI model reaches for common sentence structure patterns that can feel repetitive and sometimes create strange or complicated sentences. You should revise the AI-generated text so it more naturally reflects the flow of your writing style. 

Check your facts.

You’ll need to fact-check every claim you make to humanize your AI-generated content. AI can make incorrect, inaccurate, or downright false statements. AI developers, such as Google, call these mistakes “hallucinations,” but some researchers call them “patently incorrect,” “falsifications,” and “fabrications” [2]. 

You also need to look closer at what your AI model generates because AI is prone to stating claims in an empty way that might sound like an expert is talking, but doesn’t contain the insight and nuance that someone who deeply understands the topic would demonstrate. AI can help you organize the points you want to make in your writing, but you should provide your own analysis and apply your critical thinking skills. 

Watch for overused words.

You can watch for overused words, vary the words you use, and incorporate rich, descriptive words to make your writing sound more human. A tell-tale sign of AI-generated text is the overuse of certain words that the models seem to favor. If you’ve worked with AI much, you may be familiar with it using metaphors that compare things to “tapestries” and asking you to “embark” on voyages to view “vibrant landscapes.” AI tends to overuse these terms because it doesn’t have the genuine knowledge needed to back up what it’s saying, so it relies on generic descriptions and phrases. 

According to GPTZero, the top 10 words and phrases that generative AI uses significantly more often than human writing as of February 2025 are [3]:

1. Provide a valuable insight: 468 times more often in AI

2. Left an indelible mark: 317 times more often in AI

3. Play a significant role in shaping: 207 times more often in AI

4. An unwavering commitment: 202 times more often in AI

5. Open a new avenue: 174 times more often in AI

6. A stark reminder: 166 times more often in AI

7. Play a crucial role in determining: 151 times more often in AI

8. Finding a contribution: 139 times more often in AI

9. Crucial role in understanding: 135 times more often in AI

10. Finding a shed light: 121 times more often in AI

Tailor your voice and tone.

You can tailor your voice and tone to make AI-generated content sound more natural. AI tends to use a third-person voice instead of a potentially more engaging first-person voice and defaults to passive voice instead of active voice. These habits can lead to a monotonous, boring, and overly formal tone. 

You can use more casual language to have a conversation with your audience from your point of view, to make your writing more interesting and exciting. Your point of view and past experiences can also enrich your writing and make it more engaging to audiences, so be sure to include your perspective to enhance AI-generated content. 

Tell a story.

You can tell a story to humanize your AI-generated content. Stories help your customers create an emotional connection with your brand, but generative AI applications are ineffective at writing with authentic emotion. Although generative AI may present information in a casual tone, it’s just listing facts that require fact-checking. If you tell a story that you find compelling, your audience will find it captivating, too. 

Be specific and iterate. 

You can be specific and iterate when prompting the model to make your writing sound more human. An AI model can predict what tone or style of content you want, but if you aren’t specific, it will likely default to a vaguely formal tone. 

You can help the model understand what you’re looking for by giving it a role. For example, you might begin your prompt with the sentence, “You are a reporter for The New York Times.” This instruction can tell the AI model that you’re looking for a piece in the tone and style of The New York Times. Additionally, you can give the model context about your audience, their concerns, and your brand voice to incorporate. 

You can also experiment with iterative micro prompts. After you ask the AI model to generate your text, you can use your next prompt to ask it to revise its work, writing in a different tone or using other words to give you a subtly distinct result. 

Use AI to humanize AI.

You can use AI to humanize AI. The idea that a computer can help another computer sound more human may sound counterintuitive, but AI tools can help you look for signs of AI-generated text so you can adjust them. 

For example, you can use an AI detector algorithm to show you which parts of your writing sound like AI, allowing you to focus your energy on improving those passages. An AI detector does this analysis by recognizing the subtleties between human and AI-generated writing and comparing your work to the patterns it already understands. However, the downside of using these detectors is that they’re unreliable and aren’t improving at the same rate as generative AI, meaning they seem to be perpetually behind the capabilities of generative AI. 

You can also use algorithms designed to improve AI-generated text. These tools won’t generate completely new text for you, but they can take the input text and make changes to it based on these and other patterns that reveal AI work. A few tools to explore include: 

• Stealthwriter.AI

• WriteSonic

• Humanize AI

• Ahrefs

• StealthGPT

• Grammarly AI

Learn more about improving AI content on Coursera

AI-generated content can help you fill a page quickly, but it’s important to humanize your AI content so it’s more engaging to your audience and authoritative enough to help you improve your search engine results. 

If you want to learn more about how you can use and improve AI content, consider enrolling in a course about generative AI on Coursera. DeepLearning.AI’s Generative AI for Everyone course can help you gain an understanding of the basics of generative AI and how it works. Or, the Generative AI with Large Language Models course, co-designed by DeepLearning.AI and Amazon Web Services, explains how experts train large language models used for generative AI, how they work, and how to apply generative AI.