Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the landscape of content creation, offering unprecedented speed and efficiency. However, AI-generated content often lacks the warmth and relatability that only human touch can provide. To truly engage your audience, it’s crucial to humanize content, making it feel natural and authentic.

Humanizing AI content enhances reader engagement, improves SEO performance, and builds trust with your audience. This guide provides practical tips, tools, and a checklist to help you achieve this, ensuring your content is not only efficient but also resonates on a human level. Whether you’re a marketer, content creator, or business owner, this article will equip you with the strategies needed to make your AI-generated content truly compelling.

Definition of Humanize AI Content

Humanizing AI content refers to the process of enhancing AI-generated text to make it more engaging, relatable, and authentic, akin to content created by humans. This involves infusing the content with emotional depth, personal anecdotes, conversational tone, and context-specific nuances that resonate with readers on a personal level.

Is it important? Absolutely! Let’s look at it in detail.

The Importance of Humanizing AI Content

Engagement

Humanized content is more likely to capture and hold readers’ attention. It creates a connection through relatable language and personal anecdotes, leading to higher engagement rates.

When readers feel that the content speaks directly to them, they are more inclined to interact with it, share it, and return for more. This increased interaction signals to search engines that the content is valuable, further boosting its visibility.

One of the clearest signs that a text is written by AI is the lack of emotional connection, try to avoid it!

SEO Performance

Search engines favor content that is valuable and engaging. Humanizing AI content ensures it is keyword-rich and user-friendly, which improves search rankings and discoverability. Natural language processing and semantic search are increasingly important in SEO, meaning that content that mimics human conversation will rank higher.

Additionally, engaging content encourages backlinks and social shares, both of which are critical factors in SEO performance.

Trust and Loyalty

Authentic and relatable content fosters trust and loyalty among readers. When your audience feels a genuine connection, they are more likely to return and engage with your content regularly. Trust is built when readers perceive the content as coming from a credible source that understands their needs and concerns.

Over time, this trust transforms into loyalty, with readers repeatedly choosing your content over competitors’, leading to a more robust and dedicated audience base.

By focusing on these aspects, you can ensure that your AI-generated content meets technical requirements and resonates deeply with your audience, driving better engagement, SEO performance, and trust.

Before Using AI

Before even starting to create any content you must complete some important tasks if you want to get the quality you expect. Here are some ideas:

Train Your Tool

Training your AI tool effectively is crucial for generating high-quality content that aligns with your brand and meets your audience’s needs. Here’s an expanded process to guide you:

1. Define the Objective of the Content Piece

Clearly state what you want the content to achieve. Objectives could range from informing and entertaining to persuading or educating your audience. For instance, if your goal is to educate, outline the key learning outcomes you want readers to gain. Specify whether the content should introduce a new concept, deepen understanding of a topic, or provide actionable steps.

2. Describe the Target Audience

Understand who your readers are by detailing their demographics (age, gender, location, education level) and psychographics (interests, values, lifestyle). Identify their pain points, concerns, and problems. This helps in tailoring the content to address their specific needs and preferences, making it more engaging and relevant. For example, if your audience consists of small business owners, their pain points might include time management and budget constraints.

3. Define Desired Actions Post-Reading

Decide what actions you want your readers to take after engaging with the content. This could be subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a resource, making a purchase, or sharing the content on social media. Craft clear calls to action (CTAs) that guide these desired outcomes.

For instance, if the goal is to increase newsletter subscriptions, include a compelling CTA such as, “Subscribe to our newsletter for more tips on improving your business efficiency.”

4. Establish the Brand’s Tone of Voice

Define the tone of voice that reflects your brand’s personality. Is it formal, casual, professional, friendly, authoritative, or playful? Provide examples of existing content that embody this tone to help the AI tool understand and replicate it.

For example, if your brand’s tone is friendly and approachable, provide samples of content that use conversational language and positive, encouraging phrases.

5. Provide Competitor Benchmarks

Identify and analyze your competitors’ content to understand what works well in your industry. Highlight specific aspects that your content needs to surpass, such as readability, engagement levels, or SEO performance. This benchmark sets a standard for the AI to aim for.

For instance, if a competitor’s blog posts are well-received due to their thorough research and interactive elements, ensure your AI-generated content includes similar or better features.

6. Define Essential Elements for Inclusion

Specify any critical components that should be part of the content, such as graphics, quotes, infographics, references, data, and research findings. These elements can enrich the content, making it more informative and visually appealing.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post on industry trends, include relevant statistics, expert quotes, and illustrative infographics to support your points and enhance the reader’s understanding.

Establish Your Tone of Voice

Establishing a consistent tone of voice is crucial for creating content that resonates with your audience and maintains your brand’s identity. Here’s a step-by-step approach:

1. Analyze Existing Content

Review various your brand’s existing content, including social media updates, blog posts, newsletters, and more. Identify pieces that unmistakably represent your brand without needing a logo for identification. This critical review helps pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.

2. Describe the Tone in Three Words

Gather your content team, including writers, designers, and key decision-makers. Describe your brand as if it were a person. Is it passionate, peculiar, or authentic? Define these traits in specific terms (e.g., passionate might translate to expressive, enthusiastic, and action-oriented).

3. Create a Tone of Voice Chart

Develop a chart with three columns: description, best practices, and things to avoid. This serves as a reference for ensuring consistency across all content. For example, if “irreverent” is part of your tone, clarify whether it means sarcastic or simply unconventional.

4. Ensure Team Understanding

Distribute digital and print copies of this tone of voice guide to all content creators. Regularly review and discuss examples that either align or deviate from the desired tone to reinforce understanding and consistency.

5. Regularly Update the Tone

As your brand evolves, periodically reassess your tone of voice. Gather feedback from your team and make necessary adjustments to ensure it still aligns with your brand’s identity and audience’s expectations.

Research

Effective research is the backbone of creating valuable and engaging content.

To ensure thorough and reliable research, delve deeply into your topic, uncovering detailed and nuanced information that enriches your content. Avoid relying on a single source; instead, use various reputable sources such as academic journals, industry reports, expert opinions, and credible websites to provide a well-rounded perspective and prevent bias.

Always seek original sources rather than secondary references to ensure accuracy and credibility, tracing statistics and facts back to their original studies or reports whenever possible. By adhering to these practices, your content will be well-researched, credible, and highly valuable to your readers.

After Using AI to Create Content

1. Edit AI Content

Editing is an art rather than a science, especially when dealing with AI-generated content.

The goal is to make the content as natural and engaging as possible for the final reader. When editing AI content, be vigilant about patterns such as enumerations and complex structures, which are typical of AI tools.

Avoid long paragraphs to maintain readability and give the content personality, ensuring it resonates with the target audience, as discussed earlier.

2. Check Your Quality Control

Ensuring the quality of AI-generated content is crucial. Implement a comprehensive quality control process that includes checking for accuracy, coherence, and relevance. Use tools to detect plagiarism and ensure the originality of the content. Regularly review and update your quality guidelines to keep up with industry standards.

3. Enhance Your Content (Ideas to Enhance the Content)

To make your content more engaging and valuable, consider adding multimedia elements such as images, infographics, and videos. Include internal and external links that add value and context to the content.

Seek out original studies or research that hasn’t been widely used to provide unique insights. Additionally, create extra content assets like worksheets, templates, and free resources to enrich the reader’s experience and provide additional value.

Common Style Mistakes AI Makes

As you already know, AI isn’t perfect (at least, yet). In this section, we’re going to relate the most common mistakes AI makes, and, of course, how you can avoid them.

Repetitive Phrasing

AI often relies on repetitive phrasing, which can make the content monotonous, boring, soporific, lifeless, which can translate to a lack of interest from the reader—definitely something you want to avoid. This happens because AI tends to use patterns from its training data, leading to redundant expressions and a lack of variety in sentence structure.

Lack of Emotional Nuance

One of the clearest signs that a text is written by AI is the lack of emotional connection. AI-generated content can be devoid of subtle emotional cues, making it feel flat and impersonal. This absence of emotional nuance fails to engage readers on a deeper level, specially in those industries like retail, where the impulsive shopping is the daily basis.

One product description without any emotional impact can’t get what you get: sales.

Overuse of Formal Language

Ok, hold on for a second. What if your industry is very formal, like the software industry or the law industry? Well, even in these cases, you want your arguments, ideas, and values to reach the reader.

AI frequently uses overly formal or technical language, even in contexts that require a more casual tone (yes, also in those industries mentioned). This can make the content seem unnatural and unapproachable, especially if the target audience prefers a conversational style, something is more common than you think.

Incorrect Tone

This is something we see again and again here in The AI Content Factory. Most of the brands that use AI content fail in the appropriate tone of voice. It’s something subtle, which is challenging to detect, but which any reader can detect.

The result? Content may inadvertently switch between formal and informal tones, leading to a disjointed reading experience that can confuse or alienate readers.

Awkward Transitions

Transitions between ideas or paragraphs in AI-generated content can be abrupt or awkward. AI might not always use the necessary transitional phrases that human writers intuitively employ to create a smooth flow of ideas. Things like rhetorical questions, smooth transitions, paragraph connectors and many other things that any good copywriter uses are superficial to AI, that’s where AI-generated content corrected by humans can make a difference to your content strategy.

Clichéd Expressions

Did you know that ChatGPT almost invariably uses the introduction “In the rapidly evolving [insert subject]…” It’s boring!

AI often falls back on clichés and common phrases, which can make the content feel unoriginal and uninspired. Overuse of clichés diminishes the uniqueness and creativity of the writing, making it less engaging for readers.

Tips and Techniques for Humanizing AI Content

So, here we are, with a huge amount of content at your finger, ready to be published, but full of clichés, empty of emotions and without any kind of personality to make your recognizable brand out there.

Can you do? Hit the “publish” button and pray for the good? 🤢

1. Edit for Variety

Our job! Avoiding repetitive phrasing by using synonyms and varied sentence structures, we make the content more interesting and mimics the natural diversity found in human writing, and also with the brand tone of voice.

2. Add Personal Anecdotes and Stories

Before creating The AI Content Factory, our CEO, Carmen Díaz Soloaga created Social Media Pymes, a content agency with more than 550 content pieces and tons of daily readers. And you know what? Every single piece of content stars with an eye-catching anecdote to content with the reader.

Incorporate personal experiences to make content relatable. Sharing stories or examples from real life can create a stronger connection with readers and add depth to the content.

3. Use Natural Language and Tone

Here, at The AI Content Factory we see A LOT of AI content, every day, at least 25 pieces of content are created by our team members. We tried and tried and tried to train different AI content tools to avoid certain bias… until today, it’s impossible to train them to use more casual words without being “disrespectful”.

The same happens when these tools try to use contractions, colloquialisms, and a relaxed writing style that feels more like a conversation with a friend.

That said, it’s always a good idea to humanize AI content thought a human editing process, when a writer can measure the amount of relaxed words that makes a copy be in the brand’s tone of voice.

4. Incorporate Emotions and Empathy

Use emotionally charged language to connect with readers. Phrases that convey feelings and empathy can make the content more engaging and relatable.

5. Include Questions and Engagement Prompts

Ask questions to encourage interaction. Questions can invite readers to think, respond, and engage more deeply with the content. Don’t you think?

6. Diversify Sentence Structure

Vary sentence lengths and structures for a dynamic reading experience. Mixing short, impactful sentences with longer, more detailed ones can keep readers interested and engaged.

7. Smooth Transitions

Use transitional phrases to connect ideas smoothly. Words and phrases like “additionally,” “, however,” and “in contrast” help guide readers through the content seamlessly. But use them with caution, try to be as much natural as you could.

8. Avoid Clichés

Replace clichés with original expressions. Unique phrasing and fresh perspectives make the content more interesting and memorable.

AI frequently uses overly formal or technical language, even in contexts that require a more casual tone. For example, an AI might write, “The results indicate a significant improvement in the system’s performance metrics,” whereas a more natural sentence would be, “The system’s performance improved significantly.”

9. Use Visual Elements

Add images, videos, and infographics to complement the text. Visual elements can break up the text, making it more engaging and easier to digest. Also, it’s a matter of time: the more resources you use, the more the reader will engage with the content. Don’t be lazy!

10. Leverage Expert Quotes and Testimonials

Include quotes and testimonials from industry experts to add credibility. Expert insights can enrich the content and provide authoritative perspectives that enhance its value.

Humanizing AI content is essential for creating engaging, relatable, and credible material that resonates with your audience.

By following the steps of training your AI tool, conducting thorough research, editing with a human touch, implementing stringent quality control, and enhancing your content with multimedia and unique insights. You can bridge the gap between automated efficiency and human creativity.

This comprehensive approach ensures that your content meets technical requirements and builds trust, encourages engagement, and fosters loyalty among your readers. Embrace these strategies to make your AI-generated content truly compelling and effective.