The ability to humanize ChatGPT’s text is becoming increasingly importants as this AI tool becomes more and more widely used in content creation. One of the main reasons is that, while ChatGPT is highly efficient and versatile, its outputs can sometimes feel robotic, generic, or lacking the emotional depth that resonates with readers.
As AI adoption grows, readers are becoming more skilled at spotting awkward and “clearly AI-generated” writing—and many are turned off by it. This can pose a significant challenge for content creators aiming to craft content that engages, persuades, or builds trust with their audience with the help of AI.
That’s why this blog post is important. We will share proven strategies to transform ChatGPT’s text responses into natural, relatable, and impactful writing.
Why Humanizing ChatGPT’s Text Matters
Humanizing ChatGPT’s text is essential because authentic, authoritative, and “human-like” writing builds trust with readers. As mentioned above, many readers today can quickly identify AI-generated content and, at a glance, reject overly artificial outputs. Content creators risk losing their message entirely if readers dismiss their text.
In addition, humanized text significantly improves the quality and engagement of content. Natural writing, especially that with emotions, nuances, and varied structures, makes writing more compelling and easier to follow. This is especially important for creators aiming to hold readers’ attention, persuade them, or foster meaningful connections.
Finally, there is a noticeable gap between AI-generated content and human writing that humanizing aims to bridge. AI-generated text often tends to be repetitive, lacks depth, and carries a shallow tone. In contrast, human writing features natural sentence structures (the way we speak), emotional nuance, and varied tones—which regular readers can capture.
The purpose of humanizing ChatGPT’s text is to close this gap. Practically speaking, the goal isn’t to completely remove the “AI feel”—you can try, but doing so might require more effort than is reasonable. We are only aiming to make AI-generated content more acceptable to readers.
Let’s begin with the most talked-about method on social media right now…
Does the “Humanize” Prompt Work?
The “humanize” prompt is one of the most talked-about hacks on social media for making ChatGPT outputs sound more natural. It supposedly works like a shortcut, by simply inserting the keyword “humanize” in a prompt to instruct ChatGPT to write or rewrite content in a more human-like way.
A quick chat with ChatGPT itself reveals that this isn’t an official feature. However, this should work “conceptually”, meaning that ChatGPT will interpret it as a request to adjust the tone and style, to make the content more natural, conversational, or engaging, based on its training.
We tested this trick and received mixed results: Occasionally, it managed to humanize our sample text, but more often, it didn’t improve the output much or even made it worse. Example below:
What Are The Results Telling Us?
We concluded that using the “Humanize” prompt is not a reliable method. Here’s our are some possible reasons:
- No Dedicated “Humanize” Feature: ChatGPT doesn’t have a specific mechanism for humanizing text—it is not a feature at all. It simply interprets “humanize” based on its training.
- Lack of Specificity: The prompt “humanize” alone doesn’t provide enough detail. Without clear instructions on tone, structure, or audience, ChatGPT might only make superficial adjustments.
- Limited Nuance: While ChatGPT can mimic certain styles, it struggles with the emotional depth and subtleties that make human writing truly engaging, especially without additional context or examples.
In short, the “humanize” prompt lacks clarity and specificity—which are the cornerstone in prompt engineering. It isn’t a surprise that it doesn’t work well.
So what else can we do? The proper prompt engineering approaches, as follows.
7 Other Approaches to Make ChatGPT Output More Human
Here are strategies you can use to instruct ChatGPT to produce more human-like responses, or refine its output through additional steps. It’s both an art and a science, as you can see. No single strategy works best on its own—a combination of them does.
1. Instructing ChatGPT to Mimic A Persona
Assigning personas to ChatGPT and instructing it to mimic their writing styles is one of the most effective ways to humanize ChatGPT’s text—because you are essentially asking ChatGPT to mimic another human by doing this.
For instance, you can prompt the AI to mimic your own voice. Provide it with samples of your writing and ask it to analyze key elements such as tone, sentence structure, paragraph length, use of humor, or level of formality, and write like you.
The first step is to apply the generated knowledge prompt technique to have ChatGPT analyze your writing style. Ask it to describe the style to you before it generates the article. This gives you an opportunity to provide feedback and adjust the style as needed. Here’s an example prompt you can use:
Here are 3 articles I’ve written. Analyze the tone, sentence structure, and level of detail of the articles, and describe my writing style.
After that, you can ask ChatGPT to generate your article for you.
As you can infer, this same technique can be used if you want ChatGPT to mimic other personas.
2. Targeting Specific Audience
One of the telltale signs of AI-generated content is its generic tone, which makes the writing feel impersonal and disconnected. To address this, you can describe your target audience to ChatGPT and ask it to tailor its writing accordingly.
For example, you can specify details such as the demographic profile of your audience (e.g., young professionals, educators, or hobbyists), their expectations for tone (e.g., friendly, formal, or conversational), and the groups they belong to (e.g., cat lovers, working mums, or confused university students).
Another important detail to specify is the reading level of your audience. You can instruct ChatGPT to write with a simple, intermediate, or advanced vocabulary, depending on what’s most appropriate for your readers.
3. Injecting Specialized or Exclusive Information
ChatGPT often provides general information and discusses topics at surface level—to the point that their writing can come across as “fluff” and lacking depth. Furthermore, its knowledge cutoff date might limit its ability to address topics in a relevant and accurate manner. Both of these can signal to readers that a piece of content is AI-generated.
To address these issues and make the writing more authoritative—and therefore more human—you can supply ChatGPT with specialized knowledge. This includes specific facts, data points, or recent developments that you, as an authority in your field, know and that AI cannot provide.
Doing so not only enhances the quality of the content but also makes it appear more credible and relatable, aligning it with what human experts would produce.
4. Avoiding Overused AI Phrases
One of the easiest ways to identify AI-generated content is by spotting unnatural and uncommon (or even obsolete) phrases in its output. Phrases like “in the realm of,” “navigating the complexities,” and “unprecedented challenges” are easy giveaways. These expressions can make the content feel generic and unnecessarily formal, which detracts from its human-like quality.
To make ChatGPT’s text more natural, you can instruct it to avoid these overused phrases. Lists of words commonly overused by AI can be easily found with a Google search. Use the Custom Instructions feature under Customize ChatGPT to exclude these phrases from its outputs.
5. Using Short and Varied Sentences
Humans naturally vary their sentence and paragraph lengths when speaking and writing, and this creates a more dynamic and engaging flow—but the AI doesn’t. In contrast, ChatGPT often employs repetitive patterns, with uniform sentences and paragraphs that feel monotonous or robotic. This lack of variety can make the content stand out as AI-generated.
To create a more natural rhythm, you can instruct ChatGPT to mix short and punchy sentences with longer ones, as well as vary paragraph lengths, to enhance readability. Here’s an example prompt to achieve this:
Write this article with a mix of short and long sentences, as well as varied paragraph lengths, to create a natural and engaging flow.
6. Introducing Emotion and Empathy
Yet another important difference between human and AI writing is the ability to convey emotion and empathy. AI-generated content often feels flat, missing the emotional depth that helps connect with readers personally. By guiding ChatGPT to use expressive language, you can bring warmth and a human touch to its text.
For example, you can guide ChatGPT to write with an empathetic tone, and use emotionally resonant phrases like “exciting,” “challenging,” or “inspiring.” Here’s an example prompt you can use:
Write this article in an empathetic and engaging tone. Use emotionally expressive language to make the reader feel understood and inspired.
7. Combining “Humanize” with Other Styles
Earlier in this blog post, we discussed how the “Humanize” prompt produces unsatisfactory results, primarily due to a lack of clarity and specificity on how to humanize.
However, that doesn’t mean the “Humanize” prompt cannot be used at all. Conceptually, ChatGPT understands the request and can attempt to adjust its responses accordingly. So it should be working to a certain extent. The question is: “How do we optimize it?”
One approach we suggest is to pair the “Humanize” prompt with another well-established style. This will provide the clarity and specificity that ChatGPT needs for a better humanizing effect. Below are two styles that work particularly well in conjunction with the “Humanize” prompt:
(a) Hemingway’s Style
The Hemingway’s style emphasizes clarity, simplicity, and brevity. This can help to remove overly formal or verbose AI-generated text. By asking ChatGPT to incorporate this style, you can ensure that the writing is sharp and concise, making it easier for readers to follow.
Hemingway’s rules encourage short sentences, active voice, and straightforward language—qualities that make the text feel more human and accessible.
(b) Other Common Styles
You can experiment with other commonly known styles such as conversational, storytelling, journalistic, humorous, or poetic/literary. The key is to choose a style that suits your target audience and aligns with the purpose of your writing. Combining the “Humanize” prompt with the right style ensures the content feels natural, engaging, and appropriate for its intended context.
Using the earlier example, we tested humanizing the same text by combining the “Humanize” prompt, Hemingway style, and conversational style—plus a specification of the reading level. Here is the prompt we used:
Humanize the following text to make it sound more conversational. Apply the Hemming style. Write as if you are talking to a teenager around 16 years old.
See how the results have significantly improved:
The Ultimate Method to Humanize ChatGPT’s Output Is…
…collaborative writing. Which means we co-create content with ChatGPT.
Instead of relying solely on ChatGPT to generate the entire content, approach the process as a partnership where you work together with the AI in the entire process, from idea brainstorming, outlining and drafting the content, to final editing.
You can still let ChatGPT handle the heavy lifting of generating content, but make sure you brush through every word and every sentence, pick up parts that don’t sound like you (or a human), and request ChatGPT to change them.
By doing so, you enjoy the productivity that AI content generation brings without sacrificing the quality or the “human touch” in your content.
YOU are running the show in this process, so you get to ensure the final content aligns with your unique voice and audience expectations. And most importantly, your content reads like it was written by a human—which is YOU.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed several ways to humanize ChatGPT’s text responses based on prompt engineering principles. We also shared snapshots of our test results, and why we concluded that the much talked-about “Humanize” prompt alone doesn’t work well.
AI-assisted content generation is undoubtedly the future. Writers, readers, publishers, and even search engines are embracing it as a standard part of the content creation process. However, content that feels generic, unnatural, or robotic will still fail to connect with its target audiences.
To address this, we recommend collaborative writing as the most effective method to humanize AI-generated text. By co-creating with AI throughout the process, you can benefit from the “AI-era efficiency” while ensuring the final content reflects your unique voice and engages readers authentically.
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