3 steps to humanize AI content
When I started a technical content marketing company, I had no idea I’d end up spending most of my time telling an AI how to write. Yet here we are in 2024 with AI completely transforming my industry. I honestly love it — but it’s not all sunshine and daisies.
ChatGPT has given anyone in the world the ability to generate an article about anything. Cool. Unfortunately, the results are like this MIDI version of AC/DC’s “Back in Black”:
There’s absolutely no reason to listen to that version when the real thing exists. But, with a little work, we can turn the MIDI version into something more like this:
Is that performance going to fill a stadium with 75,000 rabid fans? No. But is it entertaining enough to watch? Heck yeah.
AI content isn’t ever going to be spectacular, but not everyone wants (or needs) human-generated content all the time. Can we turn the MIDI version into the incredible, original performance by AC/DC? Heck no. But we can probably get it into salad bowl hat territory.
Here are the three steps we follow to “humanize” AI content and leave the world of MIDI music.
Step 1: Remove AI-isms
Every generative AI tool out there loves clichés and favors certain words. See this tweet from Paul Graham on the word “delve.”
More important than this chart is Paul’s next point about why he dislikes the word: “No one uses it in spoken English. It’s one of those words like ‘burgeoning’ that people only use when they’re writing and want to sound clever.”
I call these language patterns “AI-isms” and there’s a pile of ‘em:
Cliché: “In today’s rapidly-evolving world/landscape” — the equivalent to 1990s movie trailers that began with “In a world…”
Sentence structure: “It’s not just about saving time, it’s about saving money” — it’s fine every now and again, but AI just loves this “it’s not just about X, but also about Y” phrasing
Overused words: Ensure, all about, unlock, landscape, vital, vibrant, essential
Exaggerated words: Revolutionized, transformative, crucial
Unidiomatic phrases: “Is key” (e.g. learning about this “is key”), “Navigating the…”
Redundant repetition: The “same” sentence or point appears several times throughout
You don’t even need to know what an article is about to find this stuff. They’re the red flags of AI-generated content. As soon as you see this stuff, you know you’re reading an AI article.
Removing this stuff is the first step to humanizing AI content.
Step 2: Go deeper
When our clients ask us for AI-generated content, it’s not because they lack expertise or depth. It’s because they want to save time and money on content that’s more like a “free sample” than a meal. You can get someone into your restaurant with a free sample, but no one is going to get full eating bits of cheese off toothpicks.
AI content is very generic and high-level. That’s fine, but if there’s no depth, it’s boring. And “boring” is a cardinal sin as far as I’m concerned. Expertise is always interesting, so we make sure we have some expert-level insights in our AI-generated articles.
We’ll often talk to our clients about the article topic before we generate it so we can make sure we get their take on the topic. In that conversation, we’ll ask for customer success stories or other insights that an AI won’t be able to provide. Then we put those client-specific insights in the article and find opportunities for internal links so readers can go deeper.
Step 3: Edit the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of it
I think of ChatGPT as an intern who helps us to be more productive. It’s not a replacement for our process. It’s a replacement for writing (sorta). We still have to do a lot of prompting, but we’re able to get some decent stuff out of it with custom instructions and well-constructed prompts.
AI-generated content gets the same editorial treatment as our human-generated content. We usually put 2-4 hours of editing into all of our content. We put every article through several rounds of editing:
Basic editorial review: This is usually conducted by the writer who’s using AI to generate the article. They’ll eliminate the AI-isms, add client-specific insights, and look for internal link opportunities
Technical review: A technical expert (usually me) reads the article to make sure it’s actually correct and in alignment with the client’s product capabilities and business goals
Third-party review: We use EditorNinja as a fresh set of eyes to review our content. They’re a third-party editing service who makes sure our content aligns with style guides and is readable
Client review: By now, all the back-and-forth revising is done and it’s time for the client to review the article
Every round of edits I’ve just described gets us closer and closer to humanized content.
E-E-A-T: Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
The main reason we do any of this is to get that sweet organic search traffic. It’s almost always to develop brand awareness. Important content should be written by humans (e.g. case studies, white papers, ebooks, press releases, thought leadership). Top-of-funnel, high-level content built for brand awareness and SEO visibility is its own thing.
And let’s face it, we’re not doing AI-generated content to rank high on Duck Duck Go. It’s all about the Google.
Google doesn’t care if content is written by AI. They care that it’s good. They look for “E-E-A-T: Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” Good content wins. If the headline is good, people click. If the content is good, people read. If the content is really good, people read even more.
[SIDE NOTE: As I was writing this article, I learned about a massive Google data leak regarding their search engine results page and how their search algorithm works. It’s a lot of stuff content experts already knew (or suspected).]
“But Google is penalizing domains that publish AI content”
Yes, Google is intentionally throttling and de-ranking websites that publish AI content. Here’s the thing: none of that content is good. Maybe you heard about that “SEO heist” saga about Jake Ward and his AI content mill service, Byword (“high-quality, AI-written articles at scale”). Google and its users do not want millions of AI-generated articles flooding their search engine results.
Google’s search engine results page is its crowning jewel product. I think of it as the produce section of the grocery store. If I see rotting vegetables and bruised fruits, it’s a good indicator of how the store thinks about cleanliness and freshness. No one wants to eat dirty, old food.
Google knows this.
The AI content we create goes through hours of multiple rounds of editing. Our clients have seen positive results (including first-page results and inclusion in their new AI Overviews feature). Our AI content is not the type of content that gets punished. We treat AI like a freelance writer and then we humanize the content so it doesn’t suck.
Google rewards this.
AI content doesn’t need to suck — you just need a good writer
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and the like are great. They save writers like me tons of time. And I can pass that time savings onto our customers in the form of reduced pricing. Our AI content is usually half the price of human-generated content.
But it’s still not cheap. (Of course, there are “AI humanizer” services that offer AI-generated rewrites of your AI content. Oy.)
An AI-generated article from Edify will cost a few hundred bucks. A few months ago, I met with a prospect who was looking to pay $0.25 (yes, literally a quarter) per article. That’s Jake Ward/SEO heist territory. We’re not interested in creating dozens (hundreds?) of low-quality junk articles to game the Google algorithm. That leads to penalties and failures.
Every reader at every stage of the funnel deserves good content. Whether a machine or a human writes it isn’t as important as whether it’s good. Trust me, I’ve fired plenty of humans who wrote bad content. AI is better than a lot of humans, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
So, if you’re looking for some more affordable AI content that’s actually really good, please reach out. And if you’re looking for hundreds of crappy articles per month, there’s people who provide that too. The beauty of the free market, everyone!
