How to Humanise AI Content: Tips + Examples

AI tools make content creation faster and easier than ever, but can you use them and still capture warmth, wit, and personality? With the right approach, absolutely!

In this guide, we’ll show you how to refine AI-generated content so it feels human, engaging, and authentically on-brand. It’s this human touch that brings emotional depth and a real connection to your audience.

Let’s dive into some practical ways to make AI content feel more natural and compelling.

All AI language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can generate high-quality content in seconds. All you have to do is supply prompts in plain-spoken language, and the tool will do the rest for you.

For example, if prompted into ChatGPT: “Write a 1000-word article about how to humanise content,” it will create an article in a matter of seconds.

Even though the content might be grammatically correct and well-structured, the text is likely to sound neutral or robotic if left as-is.

In contrast, human content has a personal flair, it's engaging, creative, and often includes an opinion.

The key is to use AI-generated content as a foundation and add human elements to enhance its warmth and engagement.

Here's how to this:

Before using AI for content, clarify your purpose and tone to ensure it aligns with your audience and goals. Are you educating a professional audience about emerging tech or speaking to everyday consumers looking for simple tips?

If you have a clearly defined purpose, audience, and tone of voice, you can:

• Make this part of your initial prompt. Supplying this information will help ensure the AI content is closer to what you’re looking for in a final product. This means you won’t need to spend as long during the editing stage.
• Have a clear idea of what you want your content to be. This will make editing and refining the AI content easier, as you will have a clear goal to work toward.

Give AI-specific details, examples, references, and key points to shape the structure and focus.

The more detail you provide upfront, the more likely you are to receive an initial draft that aligns with your brand’s style and audience needs.

If you’re creating a blog post about “Top Marketing Trends,” specify whether you want a friendly or formal tone, which subtopics to address, and any local references you want included. This specificity helps the AI writer produce a first draft that’s already closer to your final vision.

Here’s a brief example (you could include many more specifics; this is just a starting point):

AI writing tools don’t have personal stories or experiences to share as humans do. While you can prompt AI to include stories, it usually generates fabricated ones that feel inauthentic.

This is where you can add real value as a writer. Add a short anecdote about how you or a colleague tackled a relevant problem, or mention a real-world brand that illustrates your point. Speaking from experience with depth will always come across as genuine, giving you a higher chance of resonating with your customers.

Let’s say you’re discussing “time-saving hacks.” It would pay to share a quick story of how your team cut a project’s turnaround by 30% last quarter. This instantly makes your content feel more authentic.

If you’re finding it hard to come up with some ideas, here is one of the simplest yet effective ways to humanise content by using this AI content prompt:

I’m going to copy and paste an article down below. Can you let me know which section(s) I should add real examples to? It would also be great if you could give me a couple of ideas to help spark my creativity.

Then, the AI writing tool will provide you with some recommendations for specific sections that you could add your own unique ideas or examples to.

All marketers understand that a brand is so much more than its logo, a colour scheme, or a radio jingle.

With so much of the brand experience taking place online via websites, newsletters, social media channels, and more, how you speak to your customers is key to how your brand shows up.

If your brand is playful, sprinkle in light-hearted language or rhetorical questions. If it’s more formal, use a professional yet friendly tone. The friendly aspect is crucial here, as AI tools tend to lean toward neutral language.

Depending on the size of your business and how much content you intend to generate, consider creating a comprehensive tone of voice guidelines to ensure you speak to customers with a consistent voice.

Even the best AI content generators can’t fully match your unique brand essence without manual fine-tuning, so having a tone of voice (ToV) guideline document on hand ensures you appear consistently across all your channels.

These personal touches will help your text stand out in a sea of generic writing.

While AI models typically produce reliable grammar, it's still important to review the content and refine the structure to best suit your audience.

We recommend you read the text aloud, listen to your computer read it aloud, or use an alternate grammar checker to confirm that everything flows naturally.

Readability is also a critical factor in determining the success of your content. You may be a better judge of this than an AI tool. Feel free to rearrange paragraphs, shorten sentences, or add bullet points to break up large blocks of text to enhance readability.

A thorough edit can transform a robotic tone into more humanlike content with conversational elements. Ensure your edit uses a mix of sentence structures and enough white space to support readability.

Keep in mind that if the text looks too dense for even you to read through, it’s unlikely your potential customers will take the time to do so.

AI can reproduce facts and definitions, but it struggles with empathy or nuanced emotion.

Remember to show empathy when discussing a pain point for your readers, such as tight deadlines or budget constraints. Empathy builds trust and keeps your readers hooked.

Like real-world examples and anecdotes, AI can attempt emotional nuance when prompted. However, a human writer who draws from lived experience naturally makes content more authentic and engaging.

These careful edits can elevate a piece into something that speaks to readers in ways that generic content usually doesn’t. Adding this emotion drastically improves content quality and connection with your customers.

You’ll notice a running theme here. Humanising content is all about including inherently human traits in your writing to offset the neutrality of AI tools.

Sharing honest opinions adds authenticity and energy to a piece.

Whether you share a contrarian viewpoint or reinforce a popular trend, having a clear stance can make readers feel they’re engaging with an actual human mind rather than an algorithm.

Remember that AI content is imitative rather than generative. While it creates new content, it is only a complex rehashing of what already exists. Due to this, explaining your opinion in a novel or atypical way is a surefire way to show a human side to your content.

AI can create a great first draft that provides a foundation you can refine with your expertise and insight.

This approach efficiently and productively organises subtopics, potential headings, and relevant data points. Then, you can invest time into fleshing out each section with personal stories, brand tone, and emotional nuance.

While it may require extra effort compared to letting AI create a final draft, the result is well worth it. You offset the dryness of machine-written text and create something truly engaging for your audience.

Here’s an example of a first draft made by AI:

By combining these 8 steps, you’ll create content that reads as if it were written by a thoughtful person, not just a machine.

There’s so much content out there clogging up your readers’ tabs. It’s hard to compete for their attention and get your message across.

A human-like voice can now be the difference between a quick skim and a genuine connection that nurtures your leads to conversion.

Converting AI-generated content into human-written text ensures your content:

• Reflects authenticity
• Builds trust
• Carries your brand’s unique tone

It’s critical to show up as your unique, authentic brand wherever your customers encounter you.

It also matters for SEO (search engine optimisation) and Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

This framework explains how Google rewards content when it “helps people” and demonstrates real-world knowledge.

Identifying AI-generated content is tricky, and the technology is constantly evolving.

A quick reminder of how LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT create content: they use complex math to make guesses, using association to determine the probability of word placement.

LLMs follow structured patterns to generate responses based on existing data. As a result, the output can sometimes feel formulaic, with sentences that flow predictably and paragraphs that may benefit from added transitions or tonal variation.

Let’s see a few other things to look for that sometimes give AI-generated content away:

With the rise of AI, many brands are interested in determining whether or not a piece of content was created using AI.

So, there are many AI content detectors out there that generally assign your content a score, which is simply an assessment of the likelihood that it was AI-generated.

Here’s an example of one in action:

Rewriting or refining your text to bypass AI detection (and get a variation on the “human-written” or “Not AI” label) is a way for you to be confident your content doesn’t sound overly generic.

Essentially, a human edit layer turns AI’s efficiency into genuinely valuable, reader-focused content, satisfying both your audience’s expectations and Google’s E-E-A-T criteria.

AI sometimes recycles the same words or sentence structures. You’ll be able to find some of these telltale lists of phrases and structures online. Many marketers have compiled lists of these structures and phrases and shared them via LinkedIn.

Below is a snippet of an answer to the question, “Explain why businesses need to use AI to remain competitive.”

Within the answer, the opening phrase is a dead giveaway: “In today’s fast-paced…” This phrase is one example of a common sentence starter that AI writing tools often use, and it would be a red flag for any knowledgeable reader.

The text may dodge emotional stances or personal anecdotes. In the example below, you can see Gemini refrains from giving an actual answer to the question.

At first glance, it is reasonable to suggest that the “best” depends on context. Yet, a human writer would go on to make specific recommendations, perhaps based on personal experience with each tool. When you consider this, you see the AI answer is lacking in real insight.

For example, the content may have a wide range of issues:

• Unnatural fluency: It’s correct yet oddly uniform, missing stylistic variations or nuanced tone shifts.
• Inaccurate facts: AI can occasionally misinterpret data or present outdated information.
• Missing sources: Citations or references might be absent, leaving claims unsupported. Occasionally, these tools will even generate their own made-up sources. In the example below, we see stats without citations reflecting the importance of video marketing. Yet, there is no immediate way to check the veracity of the claims.

These clues can hint that content is machine-generated rather than truly human.

Let’s take everything we’ve learned to compile a list of best practices as you approach your content humanisation:

It is a fundamental part of content marketing to ensure your content has value and offers something meaningful for readers. Add your lessons learned, relatable errors, or specific success stories that only humans can provide.

Keep your style consistent with your brand’s established tone. AI text can be a starting point, but it’s your voice that resonates. Customers have a finely tuned sense of what to expect, and falling short in terms of voice can be damaging to your brand.

Rewrite overly passive sentences to feel more direct and engaging for a more natural flow.

Chatty language, contractions, and friendly questions can help text sound more “alive.” Read your text aloud to ensure it flows like spoken text would.

AI text tools often repeat themselves. A thorough edit ensures the text is concise and punchy. Check that paragraphs don’t repeat themselves, rephrasing the same idea in different ways. Good writers tend to be better self-editors than AI.

Use an AI detection tool to understand whether your work contains AI-generated elements that search engines like Google might recognise. If you frequently use AI tools, you'll become more familiar with the common traits of AI writing and refine your content accordingly.

AI advancements have changed how content is created, making it easier for business owners and professionals to create helpful content quickly and efficiently. The best content requires a human touch.

Explore Salesforce Artificial Intelligence. Learn more about our conversational AI and generative AI capabilities to fit your business. Watch AI demos or talk to an expert.