The demand for humanizing AI content has surged significantly in the past year, with searches for “How to humanize AI content” increasing by 943%. Companies are striving to make AI-generated content more relatable and engaging, either to improve its quality or to outsmart AI detection tools. However, the process of humanizing AI content may not be as effective as it seems.
Challenges of Humanizing AI Content
While AI technology offers speed, scale, and efficiency, attempting to humanize AI-generated content can be a flawed process. Editing and rewriting long-form AI content to add a human touch undermines the very essence of using AI in the first place. By the time the content is enriched with human elements, the effort put in may as well have been invested in creating original content from scratch.
Moreover, subjecting humanized AI content to AI detectors for validation of humanity seems counterintuitive. Spending hours editing AI content to pass as human, only to have it deemed as AI by another AI, can be demoralizing for writers. The entire process becomes a loop of trying to meet unrealistic standards, leading to compromised content quality and writer dissatisfaction.
The Impact on Writers
For writers tasked with humanizing AI content, the process can be demoralizing and time-consuming. The pressure to ensure AI-generated articles meet a certain threshold of human elements often results in significant rewrites and additions. Shoehorning examples, opinions, and insights into content that lacks depth from the start can compromise the overall flow and quality of the articles.
While AI can be a valuable tool for ideation and structure, relying on it too heavily for content creation can stifle creativity and lead to subpar results. Humanizing AI content may sound intriguing, but in practice, it can be a tedious and disheartening task for writers.
Training AI Models as a Solution
One way to improve the humanization process is by training AI models on your content from the beginning. By running AI-generated articles through a self-trained AI model before making manual edits, you can enhance the level of humanity in the content. Training AI models with specific guidelines and examples can help improve the overall output and reduce the manual effort required for humanization.
Tools like Claude and ChatGPT offer options for training AI models on custom content, allowing for iterative refinement and better alignment with your brand’s tone and style. While training AI models can be time-consuming, it can ultimately improve the efficiency of the humanization process and enhance the quality of AI-generated content.
Pushing Back Against Humanizing AI Content
When faced with the task of humanizing AI content, it’s essential to question the efficiency of such strategies and advocate for more effective alternatives. Providing feedback on the challenges faced during the humanization process, tracking time spent on manual edits, and highlighting the risks of subpar content can help shift the focus towards more impactful content creation strategies.
Guiding stakeholders towards AI content that requires less human intervention, such as glossaries, product descriptions, FAQs, and wikis, can also help streamline the content creation process. Proposing non-AI initiatives that have proven to drive traffic at scale, such as creating free tools, programmatic content, and content localization, can offer viable alternatives to humanizing AI content.
Embracing a New Approach to AI Content
Ultimately, the key to successful content creation lies in leveraging AI as a tool for ideation and drafting, rather than relying on it to ghostwrite entire articles. Collaborating with AI to enhance ideas, structure content, and refine writing can lead to more efficient and engaging content creation processes.
As Moz’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Chima Mmeje, emphasizes, AI content should complement human creativity, not replace it entirely. Writers should use AI as a guide to enhance their work, rather than as a crutch to produce entire pieces of content. By trusting in the creative capabilities of human writers and embracing AI as a supportive tool, companies can achieve a balance that drives quality content and sustainable growth.
In conclusion, the process of humanizing AI content may seem like a solution to improving the quality of AI-generated content, but in reality, it can be inefficient and demoralizing for writers. By reevaluating content creation strategies, training AI models effectively, and embracing a collaborative approach to content creation, companies can harness the power of AI while preserving the human touch in their content. Trusting in the skills and creativity of human writers is essential in creating engaging and impactful content that resonates with audiences.