I’ve been studying AI for 10 years and writing professionally for 5, and I made a 10-step guide to teach you how to humanize your AI writing.

AI writing has tells. Some you know—em dashes, lists in triads, negation-affirmation pairs, “delve”—but most you miss. This guide fixes both those you know and those you don’t with actionable prompts and examples.

Steps 0-5 are prompts that fix ~85% of bad AI writing (popular AI detectors like Pangram and QuillBot flag the resulting output as “100% human”). They address surface tics, excessive abstraction, blandness, fake sensory language, forced callbacks, and overexplaining.

You just run the prompts and see the results.

Steps 6-10 are human moves AI can’t replicate. Breaking the fourth wall, making internal callbacks, cracking jokes, switching registers, and getting weirdly specific.

These require your input (and your judgment).

Block I: What AI does that it shouldn’t

• Step 0-The bare minimum: Fix punchline em dashes, unnecessary juxtapositions (“not X but Y”), and triads.

• Step 1-Escape the abstraction trap: AI abuses abstract nouns; replace them with concrete images, nouns you could hold, smell, or draw.

• Step 2-Disable the harmless filter: Add conflict and weirdness, etc. Stories without some kind of “harm” are sedatives.

• Step 3-Introduce sensory betrayal: Find sensory details that would surprise someone who only knows the thing from reading (that is, AI).

• Step 4-Delete forced callbacks: Remove tense shifting and awkward object personification (objects can’t remember).

• Step 5-Trust your beloved reader: Delete explanations following implicit images. Apply “Show, don’t tell.”

Block II: What humans do that AI doesn’t

• Step 6-Break the fourth wall: Add parenthetical asides that acknowledge the reader. Go “meta.”

• Step 7-Make internal callbacks: Return to earlier characters and details to create thematic coherence and consistency.

• Step 8-Crack jokes to relieve tension: A well-placed joke can transform good writing into great writing.

• Step 9-Switch registers naturally: Let formal and casual coexist in the same sentence.

• Step 10-Become detail-oriented: Get weirdly specific with details only a real person can notice.

The guide includes a downloadable PDF with all prompts, a mega-prompt combining steps 0-5, and a full example (fiction) transforming one paragraph from obvious AI slop to something that reads like a human.

I have also explained why I think this guide is a win-win for both people who like AI writing and people who dislike it.