How to Humanize AI Content

According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Generative AI & How It Will Revolutionize Marketing study, 56% of marketers who use generative AI for content creation say it performs better than content created without it. So, what are the other 44% getting wrong? Chances are, they’re prioritizing quantity over quality. 

AI has made it astoundingly easy to fill a content calendar. It’s a powerful tool and a fantastic starting point, but it’s also the reason the internet is flooded with a massive amount of mediocre, soulless content. Readers drown in a sea of predictable, uninspired articles that all say the same thing in the same voice.

Hitting “generate” then “publish” is a race to the bottom that ignores the one thing that earns trust, engagement, and rankings: genuine human connection. Your audience can spot a robot a mile away and feel the sterile, perfect rhythm of an algorithm.

Generating endless pages of AI doesn’t give you an unfair advantage. But knowing how to take that 50% solution and skillfully, artfully, and authentically shape it absolutely does. Our job is restoring the natural rhythm, credibility, and personality that AI drafts lack.

The real-world benefits of humanizing AI content

AI-generated text is a commodity, but human-polished content is an asset and a competitive advantage:

• Consistent branding. AI doesn’t know your brand’s personality and can’t capture your unique perspective, inside jokes, mission, and values or the way you see the world. Humanization is where you inject that soul, building the brand recognition and emotional connection that AI can’t fake.
• Improved reader engagement. Robots write for systems, but people write for people. The human touch introduces natural conversational flow, empathy, and storytelling. It’s the difference between content that a user scans and content that an audience connects with.
• Stronger SEO performance. Search engines reward value, not forced keywords. A human-led edit is what adds true information gain, demonstrates experience and authority (Google’s elusive E-E-A-T standards), and creates the differentiated, exceptional content that search algorithms are designed to find and reward.
• Enhanced credibility and trust. AI drafts can be wrong. They frequently present shaky reasoning, cite outdated stats, or just make things up. Remember the AI overview that suggested putting glue on pizza? The human-in-the-loop process of fact-checking and adding credible insights prevents hallucinations like these from cropping up in your published content.
• Brand scalability. Humanization lets you scale content production with AI without diluting your brand and creates a repeatable process for meeting your brand’s standards with each new piece of content.

How to humanize AI content

It all starts with a deliberate, human-led workflow that rebuilds the copy from the voice down. Here’s our eight-step process to transform raw AI output into content that feels authentic and performs at the highest level:

1. Adjust the voice and tone.
2. Tighten the structure.
3. Complete a full fact check.
4. Remove telltale signs of AI writing.
5. Improve the readability.
6. Add internal and external links.
7. Integrate human insight.
8. Optimize for keywords.

1. Adjust the voice and tone

AI-generated drafts usually fall into one of two voice and tone traps: a standard AI voice or forced stylization.

The standard voice is neutral, polite, and overly helpful. It has zero personality, and it’s packed with filler transitions, uniform sentence rhythms, and repeated ideas. The forced voice is what happens when you prompt it to be witty or casual. The result is exaggerated and unnatural.

To find the authentic voice:

1. Review the client materials. Before you touch a single word, immerse yourself in the goal voice. Read the style guide and look at past blog examples. Get a feel for the brand’s rhythm, humor level, formality, and confidence. 
2. Examine the current piece. Read the draft and identify what’s wrong. Where does it feel flat or robotic? Where is the personality overdone or performative?
3. Prioritize the biggest gaps. You don’t have to fix everything at once. Identify the most glaring problems — a flat intro or a bizarre analogy — and tackle those first to make the biggest impact on the tone.
4. Make the changes. Where the draft is flat, add authentic voice elements. Vary the sentence rhythm, use natural phrasing, and inject brand-appropriate confidence. Where the draft is overly witty, dial down the artificial humor so it doesn’t distract from the message.

2. Tighten the structure

AI drafts look organized at first glance, with headings, paragraphs, and lists. But when you read them closely, they often lack a logical pulse. The structure is usually either overstructured or too loose.

Overstructured sections are common. You’ll see paragraphs that just repeat the same idea in different ways, offering no real progression and sentences that feel interchangeable. Loose flow is the opposite problem, where the draft jumps between points without clear transitions, forcing the reader to do the work of connecting the ideas.

A human editor’s job is to find the core argument and make sure every sentence serves it:

1. Identify the throughline. Read the piece once without editing. What is the one big idea this article is trying to prove? What is the logical path from the intro to the conclusion?
2. Tighten the internal structure. Get ruthlessly surgical. Combine or cut redundant sentences and paragraphs, and reorder sentences so each idea builds naturally on the one that came before it.
3. Maintain a natural rhythm. AI often writes in a very even, predictable pace. You need to break this up. Vary your sentence length and construction. Follow a long, complex sentence with a short, punchy one. Cut all the filler phrases and robotic openers.
4. Test the flow by reading it aloud. Reading out loud is the ultimate test. If your copy sounds natural and conversational when you speak it, you’ve hit the mark. If it sounds like an overly formal robot, you still have work to do.

3. Complete a full fact check

Complete fact checks are non-negotiable. AI is wrong all the time, and this is the main reason using AI without expert oversight can harm your brand’s reputation.

It presents shaky reasoning, pulls from fabricated stats, makes oversimplified claims, or draws conclusions from faulty premises. Even when it’s not technically wrong, its claims are almost always unsubstantiated. It loves to say “studies show” without ever linking to, or even knowing, the study.

To protect your brand’s credibility:

• Isolate all specific claims. Before you can verify, you have to identify. Go through the text and highlight every fact, statistic, example, and definition that is presented as objective truth.
• Verify accuracy and logic. Check every single claim for accuracy. Read each logical leap (look for words like “because” and “therefore”) to make sure the reasoning actually holds up.
• Add citations and support. Add authoritative external links for any statistic or claim that isn’t common knowledge. This builds trust and demonstrates E-E-A-T.
• Remove information that can’t be verified. If you find a claim that seems shaky and you can’t find a credible source to back it up, remove it. Never invent data or attribute a claim to a non-existent source. When in doubt, throw it out.

4. Remove telltale signs of AI writing

Even after you fix the voice and facts, AI leaves artifacts behind — recognizable patterns and habits that scream robot to a savvy reader. Your next job is to hunt down and erase them.

You’ll see them in three main areas:

Word choice patterns. AI loves to use formal, inflated verbs. If your draft is full of words like “delve,” “explore,” “embark,” “unveil,” “harness,” “leverage,” and “utilize,” you’ve got an AI draft. It also defaults to filler transitions and soft, academic adjectives like “pivotal,” “essential,” and “significant.”

Sentence structure habits. AI leans on mirrored or contrasting sentence formats. You’ll see these patterns repeated over and over:

• “It’s not about X; it’s about Y.”
• “X isn’t just Y, it’s Z.”
• “More than simply X, Y does Z.”
• “Whether you’re [Persona A] or [Persona B], [Result C] is true.”
• “It not only [does X], but it also [does Y].”
• “By [doing this action], you can [unlock that benefit].”

Stylistic tics. AI has habits. It loves using endless em dashes, semicolons, and colons to control its rhythm and compulsively uses serial lists within its sentences (packing four, five, or six lists into a single paragraph). It also writes in uniform paragraph lengths and adores formulaic intros (“In today’s fast-paced world…”, “With the rise of…” ) and conclusions (“In conclusion…”, “Ultimately, it’s clear that…” ).

The fix is a systematic search-and-destroy mission:

1. Identify visible patterns. Scan for repeated sentence forms or AI artifact words that appear across multiple sections.
2. Use find and replace strategically. Run a search for words and phrases “delve” and “it’s important to note.” Seeing the count gives you a clear hit list to tackle.
3. Remove repetition. Replace the inflated verbs with natural, plain-language alternatives.
4. Adjust AI-style choices. Rebuild the repetitive sentence structures to vary your article’s rhythm. Swap out those extra em dashes and colons for commas or just rewrite the sentences.

5. Improve the readability

A wall of text is a wall of text, even if a robot wrote it. AI-generated content is often monotonous to look at, relying on long, uniform paragraphs, inconsistent heading hierarchy, and a strange, unintentional overuse of bolding.

The readability pass is all about visual rhythm and scannability:

• Introduce bulleted and numbered lists. AI often crams a series of points into a long, comma-filled sentence. Break these out into clean, scannable lists.
• Correct heading hierarchy. Make sure your headings follow a logical order (H3s under H2s) for user experience and SEO.
• Vary paragraph length. Break up those dense blocks of text to create visual movement on the page. Look for a powerful sentence at the end of a long paragraph that can stand alone for emphasis.
• Use white space intentionally. Add line breaks to give readers a moment to pause and digest a key idea. White space is a powerful tool for improving comprehension and flow.
• Standardize bolding. Remove all the random bolding. Bolding should be used for structure — like sublabels or section lead-ins — not for random decoration.
• Polish the flow and layout. Make sure all your lists, headings, and breaks enhance readability rather than distract from it.

6. Add internal and external links

An AI draft is an island, disconnected from the rest of your site and the internet at large. If it does include links, they’re often broken, duplicated, irrelevant, or, worse, directly include the AI system’s name.

Reinforce credibility and build a better user experience by:

• Examining existing links. First, verify every single link in the draft. Make sure they work, go to the right place, and aren’t sending your readers to competitors.
• Evaluating anchor text. Ditch the “click here” and “learn more” anchors. Your anchor text should be descriptive and tell the reader exactly what they’ll get when they click. Integrate the link naturally by telling readers to check out our content marketing services or get access to free content tools.
• Identifying ideal locations for new links. Add internal links to your own blog posts, service pages, case studies, and pillar pages to guide the reader through your site. Add external links to credible, authoritative sources to back up your claims and signal to search engines that you’re trustworthy.
• Checking link settings. As a final technical check, make sure all external links are set to open in a new tab to keep the reader on your site while still allowing them to check the source.

7. Integrate human insight

AI is pretty much a summarization engine. It can find, aggregate, and rephrase all the information that already exists on the internet. It can’t, however, create new information. Insight relies on lived experience, unique perspective, and original opinions. For this step:

1. Locate provided insights. Check your brief for any client-provided materials, such as quotes, transcripts, SME interviews, or just a few bullet points on their unique perspective.
2. Weave the insights into the article. Don’t just drop a quote in a block and call it a day. Weave that perspective throughout the piece. Use it to reinforce a claim or contrast a common industry assumption.
3. Attribute insights where appropriate. If you’re using a direct quote or a unique idea from a subject matter expert, name them. It’s a massive E-E-A-T signal.
4. Fill gaps where insights aren’t provided. Use your own experience, add an ultra-relevant example, share an observation, or state a strong opinion. These details create information gain, giving the reader something valuable they won’t find in any of the other 10 articles on the search results page.

8. Optimize for SEO and GEO

Finally, after all the human-centric work is done, make sure web users can find your content. AI can sort of do SEO, but it’s clumsy. It will stuff keywords where they don’t belong or miss opportunities entirely. That final human polish is what makes the content perform. Check these five items:

• Keywords. Make sure your primary keyword is placed naturally in the title, meta description, intro, and at least one subhead. Distribute secondary keywords where they make sense, but never force them.
• Snippet optimization. When you use a question as a heading, answer that question directly in the first sentence or two that follows to capture featured snippets or AI overviews.
• AI optimization. Make your content easy for generative AI tools to read and cite by using clear headings, structured lists, and original data.
• Image alt text. If the article has images, write descriptive alt text that includes keywords where natural for accessibility and image search.
• Meta elements. Write a clean meta title (under 60 characters) and a compelling meta description (under 160 characters) that includes the primary keyword and gives a clear, valuable reason to click.

Expert oversight is your unfair advantage

AI is the best creative assistant a content team could ask for. Still, it’s not and never will be the creator, strategist, expert, or quality assessor. You are.

Instead of making the content landscape harder to penetrate, the flood of generic, robotic content has raised the bar when it comes to creating exceptional content. Your audience is craving authenticity more than ever. They want a real perspective, a trustworthy voice, and content that actually helps them.

Our eight-step process is how you deliver it. It’s a lot of work, requires time, expertise, and a team obsessed with craftsmanship. But creating a truly valuable asset amplifies your brand, connects with your audience, builds authority, and drives real results.

It’s the human-led process that makes content truly Stellar.