Folks keep asking me how to make AI content better. The answer's simple — the same way you make human-generated content better: revision. But there are a few places to put more emphasis on with genAI copy. Let's look at them.
How to make AI content sound more human
One of the biggest complaints about gen-AI is that it doesn't sound quite right. It's like CGI fire in the movies. It can look very realistic, but there's just something about it that we know it's not. Probably because we've been looking at fire forever and it's burned (haha) into our cells. We haven't been reading as long, but we have been listening, and there's something about human speech/writing that we just know in our bones. That's why the first place to start tuning your AI content is with voice.
Your writing voice is influenced primarily by word choice and sentence fluency. (These are influenced by your ideas and audience.)
Focus on word choice
The terms you choose have certain connotations and importance to your audience and you know best what those are. AI doesn't — at least not yet. So it makes sense to spend some time honing vocab and usage. Choosing the right words — especially words you know you use a lot because the matter to your work or you like them — returns some humanity to the copy. More insights on how to choose the right words
4 quick tips for boosting word choice
- Reduce state-of-being verbs
- Insert visual verbs and reduce modal/auxilliary ones
- Revise squinting modifiers
- Use the active voice
Improve sentence fluency
Those words and the punctuation and grammar that go around them are what create the rhythm and flow of every phrase, sentence, paragraph and piece. GenAI often gets ahold of a pattern it likes and overuses it. It also sometimes has problems with the organization within a sentence, not quite delivering the information in the most logical way. Spending sometime playing around with sentence patterns and checking off the logical flow makes the copy stronger. Additional insights on flow
4 quick tips for better sentences
- Vary sentence patterns to create voice and flow.
- Streamline sentences to make them more readable (reading aloud helps!)
- Combine shorter sentences when you need a smoother flow.
- Split up longer sentences when they feel clunky or hard to understand (again, read it out loud.)
This is where to start. Once you've gotten the hang of revising for these traits, you can focus on other opportunities for improvement.
Want some help? I've got you covered with personal writing coaching or group training. Email me to discuss options!
