How to make your AI-generated content sound more human – Search Engine Land
Identify traffic-stealing competitors
Find untapped keyword opportunities
Create content that ranks higher
sel logo
search icon
Search Engine Land » SEO »
Share
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can create content, but it doesn’t always sound natural.
Without the right guidance, the content can come across as dull or robotic.
Fortunately, there are techniques for making AI-written text more human-like, engaging, and fun to read.
This article explores ways to get more life-like, conversational content from AI.
Specifically, we’ll look at how to customize the prompts you give ChatGPT so it better understands the tone, emotion, and audience you want to target.
You need a user-friendly interface to interact with AI and refine the content it generates.
Most people are more familiar with OpenAI’s ChatGPT than other AI platforms (though you could also check out Anthropic’s Claude or Perplexity).
In this article, I’ll focus on guidance for ChatGPT, though many of these tips will likely be useful across multiple AIs.
To get the most out of the tool, sign up for ChatGPT Plus, which costs just $20 per month.
Subscribing gives you access to OpenAI’s more powerful models, including:
Though slower than GPT-4o, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.5 offer deeper reasoning and often generate longer, higher-quality content.
If you want faster responses but still prefer something more advanced than GPT-4o, the subscription also gives you access to o3 and o4-mini.
If you were generating tens of thousands of short snippets via OpenAI’s API, GPT-4o might be your best bet due to its speed.
But for our purposes, I recommend using GPT-4.1 or GPT-4.5. You could also experiment with o3.
Once you’re logged into ChatGPT and subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, you can select GPT-4.5 as your model of choice.
Dig deeper: How to blend AI and human input in your content approach
You can begin by asking ChatGPT directly for help in terms of building your prompts (chat messages) so that they result in more human-like output:
Several of these listed items could prove extremely useful to us. Let’s explore this in more detail.
You can start out with a simple prompt such as:
ChatGPT will have a go at producing something, even without too much direction:
This is fine, but it’s not too detailed and could sound “more” human.
It’s also too short and lacks defined subsections and subheadings. So far, we have defined:
What else can we define? Here are some key options:
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
See terms.
Now that we’ve identified key details to include, it’s time to put them to work.
To do that, we’ll need to fully restructure the prompt to incorporate all the essential elements.
As you can see from the above, we have accounted for all the details and elements we wished to add to our prompt.
There’s a lot more detail here than there was at the start.
The prompt has expanded from 15 to 220 words (over 1,100 characters). This is roughly what you should be aiming for. Now it’s time to process our new prompt.
Dig deeper: Advanced AI prompt engineering strategies for SEO
It’s immediately obvious that the AI is responding in a more human, more structured way, complete with formatted headings:
You can view the complete 930-word blog post here.
It isn’t quite as long as we wanted, but it’s close to our target length (ballpark accurate).
Remember that you’re interacting with AI via a chat interface to iterate and refine the AI’s output.
You could process follow-up prompts such as:
As you can see, there are a number of ways to refine your AI-generated content:
Once you are done refining, your content is complete.
You can enhance it with your human creative spice, fact-check the produced content, and ensure that formatting matches your expectations.
Dig deeper: The art of AI-enhanced content: 8 ways to keep human creativity front and center
ChatGPT isn’t your only option:
AI can be incredibly helpful, but it still has blind spots.
You’ll often need to fact-check or apply a human editorial lens to its output. One recurring issue is hallucination, where AI infers details that weren’t provided.
For example, if you ask it to include specs for a brand-new product, it might substitute data from a similar item it already “knows,” leading to inaccuracies.
In 2025, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps reduce this by enabling AI to fetch real-time information from the web.
However, RAG has its own risks.
AI crawlers aren’t as sophisticated as traditional search engines, so they may surface misinformation, spam, or low-quality sources.
That’s why a human-in-the-loop process is still essential.
Also, avoid overly abstract or ambiguous prompts. AI performs best when it is given clear, grounded direction.
To get better results from AI:
And if you’re not using AI for full-length articles? It’s still incredibly useful for summarizing, reformatting, or condensing human-written material – quickly and efficiently.
Dig deeper: 3 ways to add a human touch to AI-generated content
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
James Allen
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
See why competitors are outranking you and take back your visibility with Semrush.
Instant analysis, no credit card needed.
Build Rankings, Authority, and AI Search Visibility with Hyperlocal PR
Generative AI for Content Creation: A Marketer’s Guide
The Ultimate CTV Start-Up Kit
See why competitors are outranking you and take back your visibility with Semrush.
Instant analysis, no credit card needed.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
Topics
Our events
Semrush
About
Follow us
© 2025 Search Engine Land is a Trademark of Semrush Inc.
Third Door Media operates business-to-business media properties and produces events, including SMX. It is the publisher of Search Engine Land, the leading digital publication covering the latest search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing news, trends and advice. The company headquarters is 800 Boylston Street, Suite 2475, Boston, MA USA 02199.
