How to Write Without Sounding Like AI
You can avoid having your writing flagged as non-human by making minor adjustments to your style.
To make your writing seem better and seem more human, steer clear of repetitive patterns in your phrases.
Writing with contractions, using personal experiences, and using different sentence lengths can make your work seem more real and interesting.
It is completely up to you whether or not to employ AI to assist you in writing. But nothing is more annoying than having your human-written work marked as perhaps AI stuff when you actually wrote every word.
As a former English teacher and academic proofreader, I am familiar with the different ways you might modify your writing to sound less robotic. Here are a few of my top suggestions.
How Is AI Detection Processed?
AI detectors frequently search for patterns that give the impression that writing is not coming from a human stream of consciousness.
They use classifiers—which group text according to usage, grammar, style, and tone—embeddings—which establish the relationship between each word and other words—perplexity measures—which gauge the text's randomness—and burstiness measures—which gauge sentence lengths and structures—to achieve this.
Therefore, by making little adjustments in these areas, we may ensure that our writing does not stand out to AI recognition tools as being non-human.
Disclaimer: The most important thing to keep in mind when deciding if your writing sounds artificial intelligence (AI) generated is that not all AI detectors are created equal, and there is no proof that any of them are trustworthy.
Though applying the advice in this book will help you write better overall, the suggestions will go a long way toward making your work sound more human.
Steer clear of repetitive patterns
In some situations, repeated patterns might be helpful, such when emphasized. For instance, take note of how politicians frequently employ three-part slogans to heighten the impact of their remarks. Nonetheless, you can sound more human by changing the order in which you say your words.
Changing the words at the beginning of your sentences is one approach to do this. For instance, if you begin your sentences with "the," you will probably end up with a noun or an adjective as the next word, which will determine the structure of the rest of your phrase. Alternatively, begin some phrases with verbs or adjectives; in fact, this is a useful suggestion for producing more engaging content in general.
Avoid too much of this.
Large and round-headed, the lion has a hairy tuft at the end of its tail. It is indigenous to India and Africa.
Try more of this
The lion is a huge cat with a round head and a furry tuft at the tip of its tail. It is native to Africa and India.
In general, paying attention to how you begin sentences will help AI detection recognize that you are, in fact, a person.
Employ synonyms
The AI identification software is more likely to identify the associations between words if you choose the first word that comes to mind because it is likely to have been used by many other people.
The average adult English speaker's active vocabulary is 20,000 words, according to British lexicographer Susie Dent. However, when we actually consider utilizing alternatives, our lexicon doubles to 40,000 terms.
This implies that you might double your odds of avoiding a false positive if you spend a moment to consider a different word.
Remember not to go overboard. Your writing will sound artificial and you may miss the mark if you utilize too many synonyms. Similarly, with Microsoft Word, you can see potential replacements by right-clicking on a word. However, you should make sure the term you select appropriately suits the context.
Correcting this while you type could take too long and break the flow of your writing. If so, hold off until after you have proofread your writing. When you read your work through from beginning to end, you are more likely to notice words that are routine or repetitive. An even more helpful feature is that you may have your computer read your paper back to you, which may enable you to find further changes that need to be made.
Change the Sentence Structure and Length
Sentences in content generated by AI typically have a similar length and structure. Consider the following AI-written example: Member of the Canidae family, technically known as Canis lupus familiaris, a dog is a domesticated animal.
They are renowned for their loyalty, friendship, and wide variety of breeds, each with their own special qualities.
Dogs have been bred for a variety of functions, such as companionship, hunting, guarding, and herding.
Because of their close relationship with people and their capacity to recognize and react to human emotions, they are frequently referred to as "man's best friend." Dogs are extremely social animals that communicate through body language, facial expressions, and vocalizations.
Four of these five sentences have a word count of thirteen to nineteen.
Furthermore, take note of how uniformly they all read and how little their structural variety is.
As we mentioned previously, you will also notice that the same words are utilized at the beginning of each phrase.
The majority of people just do not communicate in writing or conversation like this.
We naturally organize things in specific ways to add emphasis or additional detail, employ a variety of sentence lengths, and generally make our work more interesting.
It should come as no surprise that the paragraph seems to be entirely machine-produced when it is reinserted into AI detection software.
Rearranging your sentences to create longer and shorter ones will therefore assist you avoid false positives and also give your writing a more engaging tone.
Add Individual Anecdotes
Large language models (LLMs) are used by AI writing tools to generate their output. In order to "understand" how language functions, LLMs are trained on vast datasets from a variety of sources, including books, webpages, papers, journals, and more. Because AI would find it difficult to recreate the human touch that anecdotes, life experiences, or customized language provide to writing, it is less likely to be identified as automatically generated by detection software.
Taking a personal approach has further advantages, even if the person reading or evaluating your work has no intention of running it through a detector. Google uses the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principle, for instance, to help it prioritize search results. Writing authentically and sharing unusual experiences will increase your EEAT rating when you write online, increasing the likelihood that readers will visit your website. Fundamentally, writing that is more intimate will probably be more interesting.
Employ contractions
Using apostrophes to shorten some of your words—such as "she's" instead of "she is"—gives your writing a more conversational tone and makes it read less robotic.
Nevertheless, the context of your work will determine whether or not you decide to heed this advice. For example, you might be encouraged not to reduce your vocabulary in this way when writing a formal academic thesis.
However, in a blog post, an informal internet piece, or an email, contractions will not seem out of place; in fact, in any of these writing contexts, being more conversational may even be advantageous. In either case, use contractions carefully if you do decide to use them.
You might take other actions in addition to making minor adjustments to your writing style to demonstrate that you are a real person. Sharing previous iterations of your work, maintaining a list of your references, screen recording your workflow, and utilizing version history tracking tools, for instance, might support your legitimacy and assist you in refuting assertions that your work is not your own.