Given the number of impassioned debates on LinkedIn, you might assume all marketers are either AI zealots who glorify the tech as a business panacea or AI luddites who refuse to touch ChatGPT with a ten-foot pole.
In reality, most of us fall somewhere in the middle: curious and willing to leverage AI in content marketing workflows but aware of its shortcomings.
Marketing teams that excel with AI sit firmly in the third group, too, but rise above the pack by keeping creative professionals at the heart of content creation and taking time to humanize AI content with empathy, personality, and a storyteller’s touch. They know that while using AI-powered chatbots to generate all of your content might seem like a quick way to improve your margins and speed up production, there are no shortcuts to creating authentic, human-to-human connection.
Here’s what you need to know about humanizing AI content and why integrating AI into your human-led content creation process can make your brand unstoppable.
If you’re old enough to remember the shrill screech of dial-up internet or waiting several minutes for an answer from Ask Jeeves, watching a natural language chatbot produce an entire blog post in seconds is downright mesmerizing. But novelty aside, it’s far from perfect. In fact, using this content could even tank your search ranking.
According to Google’s updated Search Quality Rater Guidelines, one of the most impactful ways to boost page quality ranking is to focus on what the search giant calls E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EEAT). AI-generated content — which can be repetitive, unoriginal, even inaccurate — struggles to meet these criteria. Furthermore, these new guidelines note that using AI-generated content, especially without adding originality and value for site visitors, can earn pages the lowest quality rating. Yikes!
In addition to concerns about misinformation, attribution or plagiarism, and tumbling Google rankings, gen AI tools often spit out content that’s a bit, well, robotic. Even when you prime the pump with plenty of context and guidance on tone, you still end up with copy that’s missing key ingredients to nurturing human connection.
Large language models (LLMs) — the deep learning algorithms that power tools like ChatGPT and Claude — work by analyzing trends in data and replicating patterns. While this allows AI-powered tools to produce something that simulates human-created content, it tends to feel hollow, cold, and even a bit odd. That’s because AI lacks a cognitive flexibility to detect and address nuance, the lived, human experience necessary for authentic storytelling, and the emotions required to connect with readers on a meaningful level.
Take, for example, these two paragraphs.
Exhibit A: A ChatGPT response to the prompt, “Tell me about the importance of storytelling”:
“Storytelling is a fundamental human activity that serves as a powerful conduit for sharing knowledge and fostering connections. It enables individuals to convey their experiences, emotions, and insights in a way that resonates deeply, bridging cultural and personal divides. Through stories, complex ideas are distilled into relatable narratives that can educate, inspire, and influence both individuals and communities.”
Exhibit B: A quote from poet Amanda Gorman in an article for The New York Times:
“For millenniums [sic], humans have told stories to connect, relate, and weave imaginative truths that enable us to see one another more clearly with compassion and courage… We tell stories because we are human. But we are also made more human because we tell stories. When we do this, we tap into an ancient power that makes us, and the world, more of who we are: a single race looking for reasons, searching for purpose, seeking to find ourselves.”
Both examples are well-written and tell us why storytelling is important. But ChatGPT’s response is dry and lackluster, while Amanda’s words are colorful, captivating and evoke an emotional response.
Research into the neuroscience of storytelling has delivered all sorts of exciting discoveries, including the possibility that stories activate more regions of the brain (or release more dopamine and oxytocin) than plain facts. Of course, we don’t need to read a study to know our human brains crave a good tale. (Why else would more than six million people spend an hour and a half of their precious Sunday nights watching “The White Lotus” season finale?)
But stories don’t just light us up — emotionally driven content also motivates us to take action. For example, one study found that stories are more effective than informational narratives in driving people to engage in more environmentally friendly behaviors. So, if your goal is to drive conversions, human-crafted storytelling may be your best bet.
Copying and pasting AI-generated content onto your website can anger the Google gods and prevent you from connecting with your audience on an emotional level that impels action.
That said, it’s also unwise to avoid AI tools altogether.
In fact, ditching AI can be almost as detrimental as over-reliance. Strategically integrating generative AI into your workflow can help you become more effective at producing high-quality content at scale, which is something marketing teams have been struggling to achieve for decades. Avoiding it makes it easier for your competitors to swoop in and claim a bigger share of the pie.
The trick is to keep humans at the helm of content production. But how exactly do you humanize AI content?
Generative AI is excellent at delivering what professional writers often call an SFD (sh*tty first draft) — a [very] raw piece of content that’s nowhere near ready for publication and will need numerous revisions, edits and careful wordsmithing. While you’ll still need to manually edit and write a lot yourself, starting with an AI-generated SFD kindles the creative process and helps bust through writer's block.
Then, you can take those rough ideas, extract the bits you think are most relevant, and add your own magic. In most cases, that means massaging the language to better align with your brand’s voice and tone, inserting personal anecdotes (i.e., the invaluable human storytelling mentioned earlier), citing timely industry insights or proprietary data, and bringing in a few real-world examples. In other cases, it means scrapping the SFD altogether because seeing a poor draft inspires the writer to develop something ahem novel.
Great writing is enjoyable: It flows effortlessly with intentional word choices, varied sentence structures and well-placed literary devices (like alliteration or colloquialisms). Great writers follow the rules of grammar, but also know when to bend or break them for effect. And the best writers keep things clear and easy to digest by avoiding unnecessary jargon or needlessly complicated explanations.
AI-generated content, on the other hand, tends to reuse a lot of phrases, engage in repetition and adheres so rigidly to grammar that phrases feel stiff and awkward. Additionally, because LLMs struggle with nuance and contextual understanding, responses often fail to connect sentences or concepts with natural-feeling transitions, which makes for a choppy read.
To humanize AI content, put on your editing cap and ruthlessly rephrase anything that feels cold, disjointed or too stuffy for your brand voice. Cut extraneous fluff, vary the sentence structures and add transitional words or phrases that support your content’s flow. Also, you might consider using tools like Hemingway or Grammarly to identify opportunities for improving readability (but keep in mind that these apps also rely on AI, and their suggestions may not be the right choice).
AI is a fabulous research assistant. It excels at breaking down complicated ideas, summarizing lengthy scientific studies, or analyzing data and translating it into useful insights. It’s also a rockstar at generating ideas.
For example, if you’re looking to replicate the success of a top-performing piece, you might ask ChatGPT how you could tackle the topic from a different angle or if there are similar subjects your audience may be searching to address. Even if you don’t necessarily like or use the ideas it provides, having an auto-generated list helps jumpstart brainstorming sessions.
That said, be careful not to rely too much on AI for ideation. Not only can over-reliance on gen AI lead you down irrelevant or unhelpful trains of thought, but it can also atrophy your critical thinking.
Additionally, AI has a history of hallucinating (presenting inaccurate or misleading information as fact), so it’s vital you always fact-check content before you inadvertently publish misinformation and cause serious damage to your brand.
AI is changing everything about marketing, from the way people search for and assess products and services to the tactics businesses use to attract and convert their buyers. Integrating it into your processes isn’t just a way to boost efficiency — it’s also quickly becoming necessary if you want to survive and thrive in the years to come. But humans are essential to this effort.
The Kuno Creative team understands that having creative minds at the center of your content marketing efforts — and empowering them with AI tools — is the best path to sustainable success at scale. By combining AI’s affinity for synthesizing concepts, analyzing data and generating ideas with human-led storytelling, lived experiences and empathy, you can produce exceptional content that inspires, connects and encourages action.
