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After years of writing and editing content across every format, I’ve developed a reliable radar for AI-generated prose. I can usually spot it within three sentences. how I keep AI prose human Not because I’m gifted. Because AI makes the same mistakes every time, and once you’ve seen the patterns, they’re impossible to miss.
Here’s what those mistakes look like and how to fix them.
The Dead Giveaways
AI content announces itself through patterns that no human writer would produce naturally. For more, see how to build characters that feel real. Once you learn to see them, you can’t unsee them. For more, see why your characters feel flat.
If a sentence sounds like something you’d never actually say to another person, rewrite it.Share on X
Throat-clearing openers. “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape” or “Effective communication is essential for sustainable growth.” These sentences say nothing. They exist because the AI needs a running start. Cut the first paragraph of any AI draft. The real article usually starts in paragraph two.
Passive voice everywhere. “It is suggested that” instead of “I suggest.” “It should be noted that” instead of just noting it. AI defaults to passive construction because it has no author to put in the subject position. Fix this by asking who is doing the action and putting them first.
Emotional flatness. AI can describe emotions but can’t produce them. “We faced significant fundraising challenges, which taught us resilience” has no human in it. Compare that to “When we lost the seed round, I sat in the car and stared at the steering wheel until my hands stopped shaking.” The first is a summary. The second is a scene. AI produces summaries. Humans produce scenes.
Synonym cycling. AI avoids repeating words by rotating through synonyms that no human would use interchangeably. “Leverage,” “utilize,” “harness,” and “employ” all appearing within two paragraphs about the same concept. Pick one word and use it. Repetition is fine. Thesaurus abuse is worse.
The bullet-point crutch. AI loves lists because lists are easy to generate and hard to get wrong. If your article has more than two bulleted lists, something went wrong. Convert lists to prose. “Three things matter here: X, Y, and Z” reads better than three bullets and forces you to explain the relationship between the items.
Identical paragraph structure. Topic sentence, explanation, example, transition. Topic sentence, explanation, example, transition. Over and over. Real writing varies its rhythm. Some paragraphs are one sentence. Some are six. The variation is what makes prose feel alive.
The Fixes That Actually Work
Read it out loud. This is the single most effective test. If you stumble over a phrase, trip on a transition, or hear yourself slipping into a monotone, the writing is broken. Your ear catches problems your eyes skip over. If a sentence sounds like something you’d never actually say to another person, rewrite it.
Add one specific detail per section. AI writes in generalities because it has no experiences to draw from. “The meeting went poorly” is AI. “The CFO closed his laptop mid-sentence and walked out” is human. You don’t need to turn every paragraph into a memoir. See the full Writing Hub for related guides. One concrete detail per section is enough to ground the writing in reality.
Cut the setup, keep the point. AI buries its best content under introductory paragraphs, context-setting, and qualifications. Find the sentence where the actual information starts and delete everything above it. Then check whether the deleted material contained anything the reader needed. Usually it didn’t.
Replace “this is important” language with evidence. AI tells you things matter without showing you why. “It’s essential to maintain consistent communication” is a claim. “After three weeks of silence from leadership, two senior engineers put in their notice” is evidence. Evidence is always more persuasive than assertion.
Fix the transitions. AI transitions sound like a tour guide: “Now let’s explore,” “Let’s dive into,” “Moving on to.” Real transitions connect ideas. The last sentence of one section should make the reader want the first sentence of the next. If you need “Let’s dive in” to get there, the sections aren’t connected well enough.
Kill the conclusion that restates the article. AI always ends with a summary paragraph that repeats everything you just read. Readers don’t need this. End with your strongest point, a specific recommendation, or a question that stays with the reader. If your conclusion could be deleted without losing anything, delete it.
The Deeper Problem
Most advice about humanizing AI content focuses on cosmetic fixes. Add contractions. Use “you” and “we.” Throw in a rhetorical question. These help, but they’re surface-level. The real problem is that AI has nothing to say. It can arrange words competently around a topic, but it has no perspective, no experience, and no stake in whether the reader is served by the content.
The fix for that isn’t better editing. It’s knowing what you actually want to say before you start generating. Use AI to organize your thinking, research your topic, and produce a rough structure. Then write the article yourself, or at minimum, rewrite every paragraph until it contains something only you could have written. If you can’t point to a single sentence in the piece that reflects your specific knowledge or experience, the article isn’t yours yet.
AI is a tool. A good one. But tools don’t have voices, and readers can tell the difference between content that was authored and content that was assembled.
For help turning AI-drafted content into something that sounds like a human wrote it, get in touch.
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