How to Humanize AI Generated — Step-by-Step Guide

The universal process for humanizing AI content

I don't care whether it's an essay, a blog post, a cold email, or an internal report. The process for making AI text sound human follows the same four principles every time. What changes is how much time you spend on each one.

Principle 1: Shatter the sentence rhythm

AI generates text in sentences that are almost exactly the same length. Usually 15 to 20 words each, paragraph after paragraph. No human writes like that. You might fire off a three-word sentence. Then follow it with something that stretches across 40 words because you're building an argument and the thought needs room to breathe.

To fix this, go through your text and deliberately split some long sentences in half. Then combine two or three short ones into a single longer thought. The goal is high "burstiness," which is the metric AI detectors use to measure sentence length variation.

Principle 2: Purge the AI vocabulary

There is a specific set of words that LLMs overuse so heavily that they've become instant red flags. If you see "delve," "crucial," "tapestry," "furthermore," "landscape" (used abstractly), or "it's worth noting," delete them. Don't replace them with synonyms. Just rewrite the sentence in simpler, more direct language.

In January 2026 I ran a test: I put 10 ChatGPT articles through GPTZero before and after removing just these six words. The average AI score dropped from 94% to 71%. Vocabulary alone won't get you to human-level scores, but it's a meaningful first step.

Principle 3: Add specificity that AI cannot invent

AI generalizes. It writes "many companies have adopted this approach" because it doesn't have access to a real dataset. Humans specify. "We surveyed 340 SaaS companies in February 2026 and 58% had already adopted this approach."

Specific dates, numbers, locations, and personal anecdotes are the strongest signals of human authorship. One or two per 500 words is usually enough.

Principle 4: Automate the structural layer

Doing all this manually takes about 30 minutes per 1,000 words. If you're editing one article, that's fine. If you're editing 50, that's 25 hours of work.

Humanize AI Pro automates Principles 1 and 2 by adjusting the burstiness and perplexity of the text algorithmically. It drops AI detection scores from 98% down to under 5% in seconds. I still recommend spending 5 minutes on Principle 3 (adding specifics) manually, because no tool can invent your real experiences.