How to Humanify AI Content
- Melchior Antoine
- Apr 8
- 7 min read
AI content often needs to be humanified. What does that mean? It means that you need to edit such content to make it seem like something written by a human. To humanify AI-produced content, you need to concern yourself with tone.
AI is a threat to both human creativity and your freelance blogging business. How do you go up against a machine that can produce massive amounts of content in a minute?
Well, the key, in my opinion, is to go off the grid. By this, I mean stop solely relying on information from the Internet. Remember when Neil Patel said you should stop reading books and focus on gaining information from blogs?
He had to delete that post because of the media backlash, and for good reason. People instinctively realize that most of the stuff we get on the Internet is watered down. With the rise of SEO and AI, the problem is getting worse. An SEO-driven approach is based on seeing what ranks and repeating it. This kills creativity and originality.
The AI-driven approach means using AI to comb through the Internet and simply rearrange or spin already available content. We end up, when it’s all said and done, with machines creating content for machines.
In this article, I talk about how you to write blog articles and content that are superior to the flood of AI-derived content on the Internet. I primarily focus on relying on sources of information outside of the Internet, such as books, and injecting your experience and personality in your writing.
What’s Wrong With the Internet?
The Internet is overrated as a source of information. Of course, it’s convenient and makes research easier. So what’s wrong with content from the Internet? Well, the majority of the content on the Internet is trash!
Before the rise of ChatGPT, this was already a problem. In the post-ChatGPT era, it has become exponentially worse. Internet users are threatened with a tidal wave of useless AI-written content, which is nothing more than spun or regurgitated garbage.
Bloggers, authors, website owners, and content marketers who rely on the type of authoritative and unique information that can be found in books have the advantage. They are in a position to create content that readers find original, fresh, and value-laden.
But the writing that can be found in books is at odds with the type of writing we expect to find in a blog and other spaces in the Internet. So, the question is this: How do you write content based on authoritative books while attracting an internet-based audience?
The Ouroboros paradox and AI
In European Medieval Alchemy, the Ouroboros is the symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail. This can be an apt metaphor for what may happen to the Internet with the AI obsession.
Just imagine a world where AI spits out giant volumes of content. Take the example of the rise of
the SEO Heist. This is where you use AI to imitate or copy every blog on a competitor’s website in an attempt to steal all of that competitor’s traffic.
We are faced with a kind of virtual apocalyptic-like scenario where AI eats its own crap just to spit out even more crap over and over until the internet is nothing but crap.
It might work in the short term, but besides Google cracking down on you for this specific strategy, there is the problem of diminishing returns. Some of you may know about the movie Multiplicity, starring Michael Keaton (1996).
The main character is a working man and family man who agrees with the brilliant idea of using clones to delegate various aspects of his working and family life so that he can have more free time for himself. He makes clone after clone, with each iteration getting weirder and weirder or more and more defective.
They eventually end up with Lenny, a clone of a clone, who in his job as a pizza delivery guy and newspaper boy delivers pizzas by throwing them onto the lawn newspaper style.
What’s my point? AI-produced content can’t be original. It is simply an imitation of something else that someone has created. If it continues, we will be eventually be faced with the Ouroboros crisis.
AI uses original content with value to spin out cheap imitations of that content, only for these cheap imitations to be used by AI to spit out even cheaper imitations until everything breaks down.
In other words, we are faced with a kind of virtual apocalyptic-like scenario where AI eats its own crap just to spit out even more crap over and over until the internet is nothing but crap.
They even have a name for it —The Dead Internet theory. According to the Dead Internet Theory, the Internet will eventually break down into weird robots having conversations with other robots.
We will eventually end up with a virtual world where AI studies algorithms to create content for these algorithms, with the supposed target audience of humans being completely missed in the process. Talk about AI being too efficient for its own good.
AI over-reliance represents an opportunity
The Dead Internet Theory may well be an exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of what can be described as a distinct possibility or crisis. But with crisis comes opportunity. If you are a content manager, you may have a content writing strategy that relies on AI. As a result, you may need to humanify content.
As writers, we should see ourselves not as freelancers or mere content creators, but instead as entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs, fundamentally, are individuals who know how to identify market opportunities and take advantage of them.
The flood of cheap AI-generated content presents an opportunity. The public has become tired of the AI-generated nonsense and are demanding human content. One study showed that most human readers don’t trust the answers given to them by AI-powered chatbots.
A new market has even evolved based on the lack of trust and poor performance of AI-generated content — AI editors. These are editors whose job it is to fix or edit flawed AI-generated content. One of my gigs as content writer and editor for a small environmental, health, and safety (EHS) consultancy included editing AI-written content for their blog.
However, the main opportunity lies in taking advantage of the growing demand for content with a human heart that speaks directly to the searcher’s needs. Books can help us craft such content.
Humanifying means wrting human-centered content
Even before the rise of ChatGPT, much of blogging was based on studying the best-performing blogs, combining ideas from them, and creating something of your own.
You can only take this idea so far. After a certain point, every article on the Internet begins to sound the same. So how do you solve this problem and humanify AI content to sound, well, human? There are two approaches to take:
Relying on non-Internet sources of information
Developing a unique tone of voice (ToV)
1. Relying on non-Internet sources of information. As said earlier, AI and SEO practices mean that much of the information on the internet is shallow and cheap copy-pasting or copy-catting.
To properly humanify AI content, try to diversify your information sources beyond the Internet. This means you should use sources such as books and human experience. Think of using scholarly books to extract original and unique content. However, remember you are not writing for a professor back in university.
In addition to using books, you should rely on personal experience. If personal experience is lacking, then rely on the experience of others. You can include interviews and quotes from people who have experience on the topic that you are writing about.
The trick is to present that content in a way that is conversational and that ordinary readers will appreciate. In short, you have to write in a ToV that is appealing.
Get In touch for help in humanifying or humanizing your AI content |
2. Tone of voice. Tone of voice is crucial as a writer in our era. Before AI, it was what set you apart from other writers. In this new AI-obsessed era, it is needed to set you apart from both other writers and machines.
So how do you develop ToV? First, figure out the following:
The target audience and their taste
The intention of the written content
The goal of the written content
The desired effect that you’re going for
After figuring all that out or even before, you need to work on developing the right ToV. This means you have to 1. Read good writers; 2. Read your writing out loud; 3. Ask friends and colleagues for feedback.
Our intensely chronically online culture makes it hard to develop an authentic ToV. It usually means scrolling through Instagram and other social media and reading quietly by ourselves.
When learning to develop tone of voice, you need to interact with others and even the sound of your own voice. This means reading good writers, whose style you like or appreciate or who are masters of their craft.
And you don’t read just to enjoy what they write. You read it out loud to hear what it sounds like. This is a deliberate and active process. You cannot learn ToV through a passive process of osmosis centered around silent reading.
The same goes for your own writing. Read what you write out loud to hear it and judge it. Better yet, ask your friends to listen to what you read and listen to what they have to say.
Listen to their feedback and make changes accordingly. This ensures that your writing keeps humans at its center. Your readers will appreciate a perspective that is beyond machine-generated text on a flat white page.
This type of approach is essential for brand marketing. What better way to make your voice or brand stand out besides writing content that stands out from the flood of robot-like voices being generated by competitors that rely too heavily on AI.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, April 08). How to Humanify AI Content. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/how-to-humanify-ai-content |
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