How to Spot AI Content: The Humanizer Trap Destroying Your Writing

Why following 47 rules to sound human makes your content more robotic than ever

Sep 20, 2025

The fourth blog in a series discussing the great enshittification of the written word

Writing’s an art, not a formula. Photo by author David E. Sweenor

"Never use however, moreover, folks, cutting-edge, pivotal, harness, delves, crucial, transformational, innovative, journey, blueprint..."

This is from a 1,000-word prompt on how to sound more human that I stumbled upon while surfing the interwebs. Someone actually wrote a mega-prompt that has 47 discrete rules for how to humanize AI writing and create "authentic" sounding content. Forty-seven rules, really?

The biting irony is palpable.

What humanizer tools actually destroy

Let me show you the damage these tools cause using my own writing as an example. Here's something from my first blog on the great enshittification of the written word.

What I wrote:

"As a product marketing manager (PMM) working in B2B tech who specializes in data, analytics, and AI, the unprecedented proliferation of AI-generated detritus that some call 'content' pains me to no end."

After running it through the Humanaizer:

"I work in B2B tech. I focus on data, analytics, and AI. Most AI content is terrible now."

Did you see what happened? Or more importantly, like the dog that didn’t bark, do you see what’s missing? AI removed the humanity embedded in my sentence. It ixnayed my authentic frustration ("pains me to no end"), my professional credibility, and the conversational style in "detritus that some call 'content.'" The humanizer turned my prose into choppy sentence fragments that sound unnatural, robotic, and monotonous.

If you spend enough time reading content online, you’ll start to spot the mechanical rhythm these tools generate miles away. It’s actually quite discouraging. Here’s another example from the same blog.

My original paragraph:

"I've mentioned this before but will say it again, the fastest path to mediocrity is to overly rely on AI to generate content. And this isn't new, it's not earth-shattering, groundbreaking, game-changing, or any other of those hyperbolic, inflated modifiers that are popular in today's parlance."

Here’s the AI humanized version:

"I've said this before. Don't rely on AI for content. It leads to mediocre results every time.
This really bothers me.
These aren't new problems. They're just getting worse with AI tools."

Do you recognize the pattern? The 2-3 sentence, dramatic single line, and another 2-3 sentence pattern. This silly pattern is now pervasive. I first noticed weird AI patterns a couple of years ago when I began writing more blogs and started using Grammarly to ensure I was using “proper English.” Every time I accepted Grammarly's changes without question, my content would get flagged by AI content detectors on Medium.^[1] The tools designed to improve writing were actually making it sound more artificial. Today I’m getting ready to cancel Grammarly altogether because I’m sick of fighting with it.

Here’s another fun one I found on Medium:

"AI isn't just another productivity tool. It's the bridge between imagination and reality.
Picture yourself at your laptop in a warm-lit workspace, icons of productivity floating around you. That's not fantasy — it's the opportunity to scale up and work at a higher level with AI.
After many hours with ChatGPT, I found the right prompts. They can turn AI into your personal product factory."

Once you see this pattern, you can't un-see it. Next time you notice those forced dramatic statements that feel calculated rather than spontaneous, you'll move on to the next article. It's like noticing that every restaurant plays the same background music and suddenly, you hear it everywhere and wonder how you didn’t notice it sooner. Like AI junkwords, the pattern becomes obvious once you know what to look for.

What’s it costing your business?

When your prospects see these patterns in your collateral, they simply scroll past your content without ever reading it. You've had failure to launch and lost their attention before they finished the first paragraph of choppy sentences. As Melissa Burroughs, Product Marketing Director at Alteryx, puts it: "Small errors like that, they add up to impact trust big time. Imagine a website fraught with these things. It is a small leap for that reader to go from 'they don't seem to know words' to 'what else don't they know.'”^[2]

When prospects scroll past your robotic and formulaic content, you lose pipeline opportunities. Your carefully planned content calendar becomes invisible. And your marketing budget generates zero leads because people ignore the humanized AI output.

Many companies are paying for humanizer services that make their content sound like everyone else's "authentic" content. The humanizer services charge monthly fees to homogenize your voice. You're literally paying these companies to become forgettable.

Why smart people fall for this

This is fairly straightforward. People know that raw AI-generated output created in haste is obvious and know that it gets ignored. Thus, they try to humanize it. Research from Scientific American shows that AI-generated content has infiltrated professional publishing, making detection increasingly important.^[3] Prepare for a future battle - similar to fraudsters vs. cybersecurity firms. But this one will be humanizers vs. AI detectors. There are actually some pretty interesting techniques that embed an “AI watermark” in AI-generated content. It’s a bit more sophisticated than this, but you can think of it like an AI content generator may put more of the letter “g” in the output than would naturally occur from a human writer.

Stop trying to use humanizer prompts. You can't manufacture authenticity through banned word lists and phrases. The 1000-word humanizer prompt I found bans basic words like "however" and "moreover" while trying to teach natural communication. It's like teaching someone to be spontaneous by giving them a script. Or perhaps, it’s like going to “mandatory fun” with your co-workers when your boss decides to have a team happy hour.

Real writers and publications don't need banned word lists. The Atlantic develops voice through editorial guidance and expert writers. Their writers don't count words per sentence or follow mechanical paragraph formulas.

What actually works

Stop trying to reverse-engineer authenticity. This may be shocking, but you could use your actual expertise and experience. You've solved real problems and learned from real failures. Share those examples instead of synthetically generated observations.

As Nancy Duarte explains in Resonate, your audience should be the hero of the story, and you should be their mentor.^[4] Position your customers' success as the focus, not your product features. Trust that your genuine thoughts are worth reading and the solution isn't following 47 rules about sentence length and banned words. The unlock is believing your actual perspective matters.

Read your draft aloud. If it sounds weird, it is. Don't put it on your website.

The bigger picture

Of course, his trend represents something larger than writing style. We’re developing an overreliance on AI and are outsourcing human judgment to an algorithm. We’re then using more algorithms to disguise the first layer of automation. Yes, it’s a vicious circle.

When you need an instruction manual to sound like yourself, you've created a new problem while trying to solve an old one. Your prospects can tell the difference between a genuine voice and a manufactured personality.

The humanizer prompts are solving the wrong problem. Instead of making AI output sound human, focus on human input from the beginning.

Next up: "Structural rigidity: When your content follows the five-paragraph essay format and never escapes high school."

Take action: Audit your last three posts for the 2-3, 1, 2-3 paragraph pattern. If you find it, you've been humanized. The pattern is more obvious than you think.

About David Sweenor

Founder of TinyTechGuides, David Sweenor is a top 25 analytics and AI thought leader and influencer, international speaker, consultant and advisor, and acclaimed author with several patents. He is a product marketing leader, analytics practitioner, and specialist in the business application of AI, ML, data science, IoT, and business intelligence.

With over 25 years of hands-on business analytics experience, Sweenor has supported organizations including Alation, Alteryx, TIBCO, SAS, IBM, Dell, and Quest, in advanced analytic roles.

Follow David on Twitter @DavidSweenor and connect with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsweenor/.

Need help with PMM? Let me know.

B2B Marketing Prompts by TinyTechGuides

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