3 Ways to Make AI Write Like a Human
Table of Contents
TL;DR
(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)
Overview
This video explains practical strategies to ensure that AI-generated writing sounds natural, human, and aligned with the writer’s authentic voice. It demonstrates four techniques: directing AI’s writing plan, humanizing AI drafts, writing in another person’s style, and creating a fully customized personal writing profile.
Technique 1: Understand and Direct AI Writing Plans
Learn the AI’s Plan Before Drafting
Start by separating style instructions from the writing task. Ask the AI what writing characteristics it plans to use before it begins drafting. This reveals the tone, structure, and approach the AI intends to follow.
Refine the Plan
Once AI provides its plan, supply adjustments so the final result reflects the desired tone, relationship with the audience, and purpose. This method allows the writer to guide the AI before any drafting occurs, resulting in more authentic writing.
Technique 2: Humanize AI Writing
After the AI produces a draft, ask it to revise the text to sound more like a person. This includes softening overly formal or generic language, adding natural expressions, and producing a tone consistent with the writer’s role. The key is to ensure the writing feels personal but controlled rather than overly enthusiastic.
Technique 3: Write Like a Specific Person
The AI can mimic another individual’s writing style if provided with samples and asked to analyze the characteristics. It can then apply that style to new documents, producing writing that resembles a specific person’s voice rather than generic AI output.
Technique 4: Create Your Own Customized Writing Style
Analyze Your Writing
Provide a sample document and ask the AI to examine your tone, structure, vocabulary, and mechanics. This analysis becomes the blueprint for your personal writing style.
Save and Reuse Your Style
Give the analyzed style a name so the AI can reuse it in future tasks. Whenever you include that style name in brackets, the AI applies your specific characteristics automatically. This enables consistent, personalized writing across different projects.
Conclusion
The video introduces a set of accessible techniques that allow writers to maintain authenticity, strengthen audience connection, and guide AI to produce writing that closely resembles human expression. With these methods, AI becomes a more effective and natural writing partner.
Teacher Take-aways
Relationship and Communication Implications
Effective communication in schools depends on trust, clarity, and the sense that messages come from a real person who understands students, families, and the community. When communication feels personal and human, it strengthens relationships and reinforces the credibility of the teacher who wrote it. This is especially important in situations that require encouragement, support, or partnership. Families and students often read tone as closely as they read content, which means that how something is written matters just as much as what it says.
AI tools can support educators by helping draft messages, but unedited AI writing often sounds generic, overly formal, or emotionally flat. These signals can influence how readers perceive the writer’s intentions. If a message appears machine-generated, recipients may interpret the communication as impersonal or inattentive, which can weaken relational trust. In some cases, AI-sounding writing may unintentionally suggest distance, lack of care, or limited investment in the relationship, even when the teacher’s actual intentions are positive and supportive.
Shaping AI drafts to sound more human helps maintain the warmth and authenticity that families and students expect from meaningful communication. When writing reflects the teacher’s genuine voice, it strengthens rapport, improves message effectiveness, and supports a positive school climate. AI can accelerate the drafting process, but the human connection is what ultimately makes communication resonate. Attending to tone, personal expression, and relational cues ensures that technology enhances communication rather than diminishing it.
Full Transcript and Prompts
With any AI available to help us with our writing. The question is no longer “How do we communicate our ideas clearly?” The question becomes “How do we make sure that our documents sound like they were written by a human and not by AI?”
We’re going to look at three quick strategies on how to get AI drafted documents sound like they were written by a human. And the third one, making AI right in your style, is pretty neat, so hang on for that one.
Basic Writing Prompt
Let’s take a look at prompt number one for starters.
This this is just a basic writing prompt here, and it has all the typical stuff that we ask in our prompt when we want AI to write something. We typically follow it up with some style recommendations, here “professional objective, slightly persuasive, and collaborative.”
Basic Writing Prompt
Role, Audience, Document Type
Purpose
Task (write … ), Additional info
Style Instructions: “The letter should be professional, objective, slightly persuasive, and collaborative.”
This is going to work for most cases. But when the relationship is important and it must sound like a human, we need to do something else on top of this.
Technique 1: Understand and Direct AI Writing Plans
Let’s go ahead and take a look at our first technique.
What we want to do is separate the style information from the writing task itself. We basically want to know what is the AI going to do when we ask it to write.
Step 1: Learn what AI Plans to Do
We need to be able to interject ourselves and our tone and our voice in that process before the drafting begins.
Basic Prompt Structure
I am a [your role].
I am writing a [document type] to
[audience].
The purpose is to [goal].
What writing characteristics should I include?
So all the basic stuff, but what we’re going to add is a sentence on the end: What writing characteristics should I include?”
And you’ll notice we haven’t asked for any writing yet. We want to know what the AI is going to do before it does it.
So let’s take a look at example. (I’ll skip example A, but I’ll put it on the website so you can get it if you want it.) And let’s take a look at sample B.
Prompt Example A
I am a 9th grade science teacher. I am writing a letter to the district curriculum director.
The purpose is to get $7,500 in funding for digital measurement tools, including various soil quality sensors, force and acceleration sensors, and spectroscopic meters.
What writing characteristics should I include?
Prompt Example B
I am a 9th grade science teacher.
I am writing a letter to students’ parents. The purpose is to see whether they can make a donation for our fund to purchase digital measurement tools, including various soil quality sensors, force and acceleration sensors, and spectroscopic meters. We need $7,500.
What writing characteristics should I include?
Ninth grade teacher writing to parents asking for donations to help buy some science equipment. And we end with the question “What characteristics should I include?”
Let’s give that a try and see what we get. All right there’s that. And go.
So what it’s going to do is it’s going to reveal its thinking. Here’s what it’s planning on doing if we just say start writing. We have a chance now to review it, think about it, see if it’s actually going to represent our tone, our purpose, our style, and our voice. And then we’re going to follow up with some additional instructions.
Step 2: Provide Input on the Plan
There’s the plan basically. And we are now going to say in our follow up: Okay. Go ahead and use these characteristics. However, let’s make this adjustment here (in this case, just make it more friendly) and some additional content.
Prompt (follow-up)
[task] Use these characteristics to draft the letter.
[More detail] Make it more friendly. Include general details about the education purpose and value.
[*clarify] Ask me questions for clarifying information or content if needed.
I do recommend at this point that you say “Ask me questions for clarifying information” just to make sure the content is thorough. We’re not going to do that for this example, but it’s a best practice.
All right. So use the characteristics to write the letter. And here are some adjustments that I need. So let’s follow up with that.
And what we’re going to get is a very nice letter that is more representative of human-style writing. Hurrah!
“I hope you and your family are doing well.” That sounds like a person, not AI.
Technique 2: Humanize AI Writing
All right. Now we can even go one step beyond this, which is to humanize the writing.
Now, if we were to ask our AI, “What does it mean to humanize AI written documents?” the AI will say we have to do these different things. Great. AI understands what it means to humanize AI writing. And as a result, we can simply ask it to perform that task.
Prompt
Humanize this draft, but keep it toned down without grandiose or excessively enthusiastic language. It should sound like a [9th grade teacher] wrote it, not ai.
So take this draft (and this is something you can do for any time AI writes something for you if you need it to sound more like a human), humanize the draft.
However, AIs like to be very helpful, and they tend to go a bit over the top. So keep it toned down without grandiose or excessively enthusiastic language. And most importantly, it should sound like (whoever you are) wrote it and not a AI.
Let’s go ahead and just add that as a follow-up prompt here. And it’s going to revise what it’s already done and apply those concepts of humanizing AI written content. And we’ll have some colloquialisms and things of that nature with a more personal touch.
So that is a really nice technique.
Technique 3: Write Like a Person
But let’s take a look at getting the AI to write like a specific person, especially like you.
So writing another person’s style. (I’m going to skip this one for now, but you can go over to the website and get the prompt if you want to try that out.)
Prompt
I am a 9th grade science teacher. I want to send a letter to the district curriculum director to get funding for digital measurement tools, including various soil quality sensors, force and acceleration sensors, and spectroscopic meters.
Analyze the writing style characteristics of the uploaded document.
Then use those characteristics to draft the letter.
(ask clarifying questions if needed)
Technique 4: Create Your Own Customized Writing Style
However, what I’m really excited about is getting the AI to write as if you were the writer yourself.
And it’s actually not too tough, but the first thing that we need to do is we need to teach the AI how do you actually write? It needs to look at your writing and understand your particular style.
Step 1: Analyze Your Writing
So we’re going to provide a document, a sample, and ask for an analysis of the characteristics, including formality, tone and voice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, word choice, mechanics, detail, and any kind of structural elements.
Prompt
Review the uploaded document and analyze the writing characteristics, including:
level of formality
overall tone and voice
sentence structure
paragraph structure
word choice
writing mechanics
level of detail
structural elements, such as headings and lists
So let me add that prompt in there first in a new discussion, and then I’m going to provide a sample.
You do want to be careful about the samples that you provide. You will write in different ways for different purposes, so when you’re doing this, make sure that your samples are actually related to the purpose that you have right now.
But let me go ahead and drop this in. I’m going to have the AI write a blog post, so let me drop in some samples of my own writing for blog posts and ask for a review.
The AI is going to give a pretty comprehensive review that we can then use. All right, so it’s going to go on for all of those different areas, and on and on and on. So let me just show you what the next part of the process is.
Step 2: Create a Custom Style Name
Once the AI has completed the analysis, what we’re going to ask the AI to do is simply save those style characteristics, save the results of the analysis with a name. And I like to put the names in square brackets, so it’s obvious that this is a name or a command, and not just words that I would use normally.
Prompt (follow-up)
Save these style characteristics as [MyTempStyle]. Whenever I include [MyTempStyle], use these style characteristics.
So save these as “whatever it is” and then we can later go back and say, “Whenever I include that particular name, use all of those characteristics which are characteristics of your writing.”
I’ve got 3 or 4 different saved styles myself, one for grants, one for academic work and books and things of that nature, one for blog posts, and so forth. All that I need to do if I’m writing a new item of that type is simply say, “Use that style,” and all of those characteristics that AI discovered about my writing are going to be applied.
This is how you get the AI to write as if it were you.
So, a quick example here. I’ve got one called Book Writer for my academic books and guidance documents and so forth. I can say I need a blog post for parents on PBIS and use that particular style, and it’s going to apply my unique style to the new writing task.
Prompt
I need a blog post for parents on PBIS. Draft it using [BookWriter Style].
The result is it doesn’t sound like the AI wrote it. It sounds like I wrote it. And you can do the same thing to help the AI write like you.
Conclusion
So there you go: three great techniques for making AI writing sound like human writing.
I hope you found these techniques useful. Take care.