Humanizing AI Text in Higher Education: Tips to Maintain a Human Touch

No doubt, students pursuing higher education need to write essays, and research papers.

And with the advent of AI, it is fair to assume that students’ research can be made easy with the help of AI tools like ChatGPT.

However, students using AI tools to write entire essays and research papers has also made generative AI technology a concern for teachers.

As a matter of fact, a confused teacher falsely accused his students of cheating using AI tools at Texas A&M University, and denied their diploma.

While using AI tools to aid yourself in research is not a bad thing, if your institution or teacher prohibits this practice, it's better to abide by the rules.

However, AI detection — the presence of AI patterns — can occur in your essays and research papers even if you don’t use an AI tool.

Yes, that’s right. It is because AI tools are trained to mimic human writing, so sometimes, your natural writing cand end up matching that of AI.

If that happens, the AI “detection” tools will generate a false positive while detecting AI patterns in your original work,

if it thinks your work closely matches that of the AI, which could confuse your teacher.

So, in this case, how can we reconcile the use of AI for research and also avoid getting on bad terms with teachers?

Luckily, a solution to this issue exists, which is humanizing AI content. Keep reading to learn more.

What is Humanizing AI Content?

Humanizing AI content refers to making AI-written content less robotic and more humane. Humanizing uses different techniques to make a piece of text natural.

If you’ve used an AI tool to write a piece of text, or if your original text has been detected as AI-written, you can humanize the text to remove AI patterns from it, and make it less robotic.

Although AI writes content similar to humans, adding nuances to your writing can make it different, reducing the chance of your writing being detected as AI written.

Steps to Humanizing AI Content

Humanizing AI content requires you to rewrite your text and make changes in it. Here are some changes you need to humanize AI text:

1. Alter sentences

Altering sentences is by far the most effective way of humanizing AI content.

AI tools have a specific way of writing. So, if your writing is detected as AI’s, it means your overall writing style matches that of the AI.

In this case, you consider changing your sentences’ structures. You can:

• combine sentences

• break sentences

• simplify sentences

• shuffle sentences

• using punctuation to create or remove clauses

Example:

For example, here’s an instance of ChatGPT 4.0 writing a short paragraph on “digital marketing.”

We can rewrite the paragraph as:

“Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products or services through digital channels.

Examples of digital channels include websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps.

Digital marketing involves leveraging various online platforms and technologies to reach and engage target audiences to drive traffic and convert leads by maximizing user engagement and improving ROI.

An effective digital marketing strategy includes search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and email campaigns.”

Along with several words, I removed a paragraph that I think isn’t very important.

The goal in humanizing is to write in a way an AI tool wouldn’t write, and the first thing you can do to humanize is tweaking the sentences.

Additionally, you can learn AI’s sentence characteristics to avoid and reduce these characteristics in your writing.

2. Use first-person perspective

Normally, an AI tool writes generally. What it means is that there’s no “personality” involved in the work.

If AI doesn’t write a certain style, it’s your chance to humanize the AI text by incorporating that certain style into your writing.

In this case, simply use the first-person style in your work.

You have to write as if the reader was in front of you and you are talking to them personally.

For example, you can use phrases like “In my opinion…,” “I think…,” “I reckon…,” and “My take on this…”

Example:

Let’s use the previous ChatGPT paragraph again and edit it.

“Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products or services through digital channels.In my opinion, the best examples of digital channels include websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing involves leveraging various online platforms and technologies to reach and engage target audiences to drive traffic and convert leads. According to my expertise, an effective digital marketing strategy includes search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and email campaigns.”

With a first person perspective, you can also address the reader directly, which is another thing not found in average AI writing.

3. Add personal experiences or anecdotes

Another great way to humanize AI content is by adding personal experiences and anecdotes in your writing.

AI tools have a very generic way of writing everything. They don’t add personal experiences or anecdotes.

You, on the other hand, share past experiences and tell personal stories in your writing, which will add nuance to your content and make it unique and less robotic.

Example:

Let’s continue to edit our last ChatGPT paragraph and add a bit of personal experience in it.

“Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products or services through digital channels. In my opinion, the best examples of digital channels include websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing involves leveraging various online platforms and technologies to reach and engage target audiences to drive traffic and convert leads. According to my expertise, an effective digital marketing strategy includes search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and email campaigns.

As an SEO expert in digital marketing, I have helped many small businesses succeed and scale up. And let me tell you, the results of performing SEO alone can be surprising.”

You can add your experience anywhere in the content. It will make your content look natural and humane.

4. Use synonyms

An easy way to spot AI-written content is by analyzing the word choice in the content. I can tell just by looking at the word choice whether a piece of content was (probably) written by ChatGPT or a human being.

It is because AI tools tend to use certain terms repetitively, which makes it obvious that the content is AI-written.

For example, ChatGPT often uses the terms like world, landscape, tapestry, leverage, and so on.

What you can do is eliminate such terms by replacing them with their synonyms. This is an easy way to humanize AI content.

Additionally, you can replace as many terms with their synonyms as you want, and not just the ones that AI repeats. What I like to do is replace the most repetitive words breakfree of AI’s word choice.

Example:

Let’s use synonyms to further edit our last version of the ChatGPT paragraph.

“Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products or services via digital means, also called channels. In my opinion, the best examples of digital channels include websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing includes using various online platforms and technologies to reach and engage target audiences to drive traffic and convert leads. According to my expertise, a good digital marketing strategy includes search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and email campaigns.

As an SEO expert in digital marketing, I have helped many small businesses succeed and scale up. And let me tell you, the results of performing SEO alone can be surprising.”

You don’t have to replace every word. Just replace common AI terms and you’re good to go.

5. Simplify the content

Another notable characteristic of AI writing is its verbose language.

These tools tend to use more than enough terms to write, which can make the content wordy. This is especially true when generating lengthy texts.

Besides, a good writing practice is saying less while expressing more, which is done by simplifying the language and making it concise.

So, always try to simplify the content when working with AI tools. You can do this by removing redundant phrases, useless adjectives, and adverbs.

Example:

Let’s analyze and try to simplify our ChatGPT paragraph.

“Digital marketing means promoting products or services via digital means, also called channels. In my opinion, the best examples of digital channels include websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing includes using online platforms to reach and engage target audiences to drive traffic and convert leads by maximizing user engagement and improving ROI. According to my expertise, a good digital marketing strategy includes SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media marketing, and email campaigns to optimize a business’ marketing, grow user engagement, and improve its return on investment (ROI).

As an SEO expert, I have helped many small businesses succeed and scale up. And let me tell you, the results of performing SEO alone can be surprising.”

Now, our text is fairly humanized.

6. Check for AI detection

An important step in humanizing AI content is checking whether or not your content has been humanized.

There are many AI detection tools on the internet to check your content for AI detection. I’m using GPTZero to scan my copies of the ChatGPT paragraph, both the original one and the edited one.

Here’s the original paragraph scanned using the tool:

As you can see, GPTZero detected the original ChatGPT paragraph as 100% AI-written.

As you can see, GPTZero thinks there’s an 82 percent probability that our content is human written and an 18 percent probability that it was AI-written. Which means humanizing works.

However, humanizing AI content manually may not be easy for everyone, either because they don’t have the time to do it or because they struggle to write, which brings me to my next point:

7. Use Paraphrasing-Tool’s AI humanizer - Your one click solution to AI detection

Lastly, using an AI humanizer can greatly help you, especially if you don’t have the time to humanize AI content manually.

Manually humanizing the text requires time and good understanding of AI tools’ writing style.

So, if you don’t have the time to deal with it, or if humanizing is difficult for you, Paraphrasing-Tool’s AI Humanizer can help.

Paraphrasing-Tool.ai can quickly reduce AI patterns in your content and humanize it, saving you time and effort.

Just copy your AI-generated text into Paraphrasing-Tool’s AI humanizer, and click Humanize. The tool will analyze your text for AI patterns and rewrite them to remove AI detection.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how students in higher education can humanize their content to maintain a human touch in their work if they work with AI tools.

We discussed 6 practical and manual ways to humanize an AI text, along with a demonstration. We also discussed how students can use an AI humanizer to quickly humanize their work to save time and effort.