Claire FountainAI tools are a blessing when it comes to content volume.
But as I’ve used them to triple my content output, I’ve seen firsthand that content quality is another story.
Nobody wants to read something that they can tell was written by a bot (and Google doesn’t like it, either.)
With several years of experience as a content writer, I’ve learned what it takes to help AI writing hit the mark. I now successfully use it to boost content production while still maintaining my clients’ voice and quality standards.
Here are a few tips and tricks that I use as a professional writer to make your AI-written content more human-like.
Key takeaways:
- AI writers can help you save time and streamline content creation, but you should always edit and humanize the content.
- Humanizing AI content makes it more personable and engaging, which can also help it rank better on Google.
- Run all AI content through an AI detector to learn where you must make adjustments.
- Writing effective, detailed prompts and training AI tools on your writing style will reduce necessary editing.
- Humanize AI content by removing repetition, adding anecdotes, injecting humor, and personalizing the content to your audience.
Best AI Detector
- Detector is part of our favorite AI writing tool for generating long blog posts
- Includes an AI image detector
- Works with ChatGPT, GPT4, Bard, Claude, & More
- Both free & paid versions available
Best AI Rewriter
- Detector is part of a simple rephrasing tool to quickly pass as human output
- Detects AI by cross-checking 8 other detectors
- Works with ChatGPT, GPT4, Bard, Claude, & More
- Both free & paid versions available
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What Is AI-Generated Content?
AI-generated content is any content generated by artificial intelligence (aka machine learning.)
AI-written content includes blog posts, social media captions, email content, etc that are created by software.
Modern AI writers can craft written work based on a few words or sentences. They use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze a given text and create entire articles or suggestions.
AI writing assistants can help with every aspect of writing, including:
- Research
- Outline creation
- Brainstorming
- Grammar
- Tone checking
How Does AI Content Help With Content Creation?
AI content can increase the volume of content you put out and serve as a great jumping-off point to create more original content.
The top ways that AI can help with content creation include:
- Reduce time spent on research
- Gather sources and key points
- Create a basic outline
- Get ideas down as a starting point
- Optimize content/ include keywords
- Streamline the content writing process
For niche site owners and those in the digital marketing space, AI content is a great way to augment your site with more content, but it is not a total replacement for organic content.
How to Tell If AI-Content Will Be Detected?
Let's clear up a myth first, because a lot of advice online is years behind. Google does not penalize content for being AI-generated. It said so in February 2023 and has not moved since: it rewards helpful content and demotes unhelpful content, whatever produced it.
What Google does act on is the scaled content abuse policy it added in March 2024, aimed at publishing pages at volume with no real value behind them. That is where raw AI content gets you in trouble, because it is generic, thin, and often wrong.
That’s why you should never directly post AI content before editing and humanizing it.
So humanizing isn't about sneaking past a filter. It's about making the draft good enough that the question never comes up.
A detector is still a useful proxy. If a tool flags a draft as obviously machine-written, that usually means it reads generic, which is the problem actually worth fixing.
We recommend using an AI detection tool. There are plenty of free ones available, and some AI writers offer checkers as a part of their services.
We’ve tested the ones worth using in our roundup of AI detection tools. Whatever score one gives you, treat it as an editing prompt rather than a verdict. They flag human writing too, and none of them actually prove who wrote what.
Why Should You Personalize AI-Generated Content?
You need to personalize and humanize your AI-generated content to make it more appropriate to your site.
Doing so helps fill in the gaps, fact-check, and make it more relatable to your target audience.
Here’s more about the top reasons AI writing needs editing:
1. To Match the Voice of Your Site
AI generators lack one big thing: you.
Your site hopefully has a unique voice and tone that fits your brand.
Editing AI content to make it sound more like you allows it to blend in with the rest of your content, making it feel more natural.
2. AI Content Isn’t Perfect
Though AI writers have come a loooong way, they’re still far from being perfect.
Some of the biggest issues with AI written content are that it can get repetitive, it can provide some information without context, and just have a generally disorganized layout.
A quick edit can easily solve these problems.
3. To Add in Data/Fact-Check
Since AI generators can only pull information that’s already out there, they may pull from sources that have incorrect information.
Checking the statistics, percentages, and general information provided by AI-written content can prevent your site from spreading fake news.
4. To Make Content More SEO-Friendly
Many of the AI writers out there today are great at optimizing their work for SEO, but it’s important to double-check to make sure your AI content ranks higher.
5. For Audience Personalization and Better Conversation
AI-written content isn't exactly… warm.
Humanizing AI content can make it more personable and conversational, (aka, the key to keeping an audience engaged).
That’s why many AI detection and paraphrasing tools, like Undetectable.ai, have the option to customize the type of writing and the audience for the content.
Why Does AI Content Need To Be Fact Checked and Edited?
AI writers do not fact-check and are guilty of repetition and grammatical errors.
As far as AI writers have come, they are limited in what information they draw from. They cannot do any sort of fact-checking on anything.
For example, AI tools don’t check to see if a site they scraped info from is reputable or trustworthy. They don’t crosscheck or verify information with other sources.
They also are capable of hallucinating (not in a fun way, in a weird way, like if someone tried to write down a fever dream.) You may get jumbled, weird sentence fragments riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Not great for content.
Looking over AI content and fixing these issues, as well as fact-checking any statistics it provides you with, are essential for creating sensical, accurate content.
Tips to Make AI Writing Undetectable
To humanize AI-generated content you need to add in the “human touch” by personalizing the content for your business and audience, cleaning up the fluff, and adding new human-generated ideas.
More specifically:
1. Use the Right Tools for the Job
To avoid having to do more work on the backend, use a high-quality AI writer in the first place.
A tool like BrandWell, which is what Content at Scale became, still does this through its RankWell engine. It writes to your brand voice and grades the draft against its own SEO scoring, so there is less to clean up afterwards.
Also, consider all-in-one detector and rewriter tools like Undetectable.Ai (review) and QuillBot (review).
2. Treat AI Content as a First Draft
Please don’t just copy and paste raw AI-generated content onto your site. We’re begging you.
AI content is a rough draft that provides a good jumping-off point but by no means should it be treated as finalized content. Always edit before posting.
3. Add in Human Generated Ideas
The thing about AI (which is also known as machine learning) is that it can only provide information that’s already available on the internet.
At least for now, AI writers can’t come up with original ideas or new concepts, so adding human insight can make AI content more… well, human.
Learn more about what to do with AI content once it's been generated, by checking out our list of the best AI writing courses.
4. Revise for Voice
The lack of empathy from AI writers can make the content sound robotic at times.
Adding in a few sentences and re-wording things here and there makes the written content more recognizable and relevant to your site.
5. Give Proper Context
When generating new AI content, you need to be specific in your instruction to the generator itself.
Giving important details like what topics you want to cover, what the goal of the article is, and what sort of voice you want the content to have can help the generator produce better results.
6. Clean Up Fluff
As we said, AI writers can create repetitive content that could be a bit fluffy.
Look at the content you’re given by your AI and trim the fat. This means cutting out extra sentences that don’t provide new information and making the content more concise.
7. Edit for Your Readers
AI doesn’t know your readers like you do.
Editing content to make it more understandable for your specific audience can make all the difference.
8. A/B Testing
Since AI writers are so new, everyone is still trying to figure out the right way to use them.
If you notice that your AI content just isn’t ranking as well as you want it to, take that into account and try a different approach the next time you create AI content.
This may mean giving the AI more thorough instruction, adjusting the target keywords, or editing the generated content differently.
9. Run It Through an AI Detector
Once you have your content all ready to go, run it through an AI detector before hitting “publish.”
If you get a low “human content” score, you may need to edit again. Though this sounds like an annoying extra step, it beats publishing something that reads like a robot wrote it and watching it sit on page four.
Check out our list of favorite AI detectors.
The Importance of Adding a Human Touch
No matter how advanced the technology gets, AI writers lack humanity.
There is a unique voice that real human writers develop over time based on their life experiences and personality. Machines don’t have life experiences or personalities. While they are great at making content sound human-like, they don’t have a personality that can come through in their content.
Having a person tweak content and add a bit of their own voice into it makes the content interesting, compelling, and easier to read.
If nothing else, add a human touch because it is the difference between a page worth reading and one that gets buried.
Does Google Punish AI Content?
No. Not for being AI-generated, anyway.
Google has been explicit since February 2023 that automation is not the issue. Using AI to game rankings is, and so is publishing at volume without adding value, which the March 2024 scaled content abuse policy covers directly.
The practical difference matters. You are not trying to hide that a tool was involved. You are making sure the page earns its place, which is what every tip on this list is really for.
Read more about that on our “Can Google Detect AI-Generated Content?” post.
Using Human Writers to Make AI Content Undetectable
If your content keeps getting flagged as AI, take a different approach.
Using a writing service is a great way to get real-life writers’ eyes on the content. They can edit it or even replace entire paragraphs with human-generated content that will make your AI content undetectable.
We recommend using a writing service to augment your content volume in general as well so that your site has a good mix of AI-generated and human-generated content.
Some pieces just need to be written by a real-life, human copywriter.
Our Pick for Humanization: Panda Copy
Our pick for humanization when it comes to AI writing is Panda Copy.
Send them the AI draft as a project brief and human writers redo it, with their own editors doing a QA pass before it comes back. They will also write entirely new pieces to sit alongside the AI writing.
Pricing is per word, $0.10 down to $0.075 on projects over 4,000 words, so a 1,000-word article costs $100 with nothing to commit to. Monthly plans start at $549 and are sold by daily word volume rather than by the article.
The turnaround time is fast (within a day or two), and the content is always high-quality.
One thing to know: Panda Copy closed its standalone editing service and sells copywriting only now. You are buying a rewrite, not an edit. If you want the draft edited rather than redone, EditorNinja is the better fit.
Read our full Panda Copy review to find out more.
Best for a One-Off Rewrite
- Pay per word with no monthly commitment, $0.10 down to $0.075
- Great for cleaning up AI-generated content
- Hand over an AI draft and get a human rewrite back
- Finished copy delivered, not tracked changes for you to approve
Best for Ongoing Editing
- Sells editing in monthly word blocks, starting at 10,000 words
- Or hire a dedicated editor by the hour, 10 or 20 hours a month
- Editors will "humanize" AI-generated content
- You can see all edits and recommendations for you to approve or deny, so you still have full control of the copy
Frequently Asked Questions
Will AI-written content rank on Google?
If AI-written content is written well, engaging, and valuable for the reader, it will rank on Google.
What are the best AI writing tools?
The best AI writing tools are BrandWell, which is what Content at Scale became, and Jasper.
Will Google penalize for AI written content?
No. Google has said since February 2023 that it does not penalize content for being AI-generated. What it does demote is thin, unhelpful content published at volume, which its March 2024 scaled content abuse policy targets. Editing your drafts is what keeps you clear of that.
Can AI create original content?
Yes, AI can create original content. But you should still humanize it to ensure it's engaging and high-quality.
How does AI generate content?
AI generates content by using natural language processing (NLP) and drawing from various sources on the internet to write original pieces.
Will AI take over content writing?
No, AI will not take over all content writing.
