3 hacks to keep your content human

Go beyond the bot for engagement

A redditor posted a list of SEO resources for writers to my favorite Reddit subgroup the other day. Thanks, ChatGPT! another redditor responded.

The post was helpful enough. There was nothing wrong with it — grammar, spelling, punctuation: check! It just had that chemical-vanilla-candle-scented, untouched-by-human-hands, robotish feel to it.

How can you make sure you’re not writing like a robot?

1. Use a better structure.

Google is testing AI to write news articles. There goes half of our jobs! After all, even a robot can cram all of the W’s into the first paragraph. Even AI can organize the inverted pyramid.

But there’s a better structure — humans love it — and it’s waaaaaazaay above a robot’s pay grade. Start using that structure, and watch your engagement soar. Wait’ll your boss/client/customer sees this!

2.Write human content.

AI doesn’t do human interest, because it doesn’t know humans. Nothing ever happens to it, so it doesn’t tell stories.

Shift the types of content you write from “Just the facts, Ma’am” to more human content, and let ChatGPT catch you if it can. (It can’t.)

3. Make ChatGPT your BFF and research assistant

ChatGPT is a terrible writer. No prompt can make it as compelling as you — a brilliant, real, live human person.

But AI can be a great assistant. Send it out to find the details for a juicy-details lead or to fetch some statistics for your data story or to gather some headlines for your compression-of-details paragraph.

Meanwhile, you’re doing your nails, eating your lunch and hanging up all of the awards in your office.

Let’s see a robot try that.

Learn to outwrite a robot.

Want to use AI to write like a human, not like a robot? Learn all of my hacks.