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AI-assisted writing: humanize the draft before you read it

The context

Most teams now draft with AI. That is fine — this pattern is not about hiding it. The problem is that default AI prose has recognizable tics: em-dash overload, "not X, but Y" constructions, manufactured emphasis, repetitive rhetorical structures, vague attribution ("experts agree"), and sentences that sound polished but say little. Readers spot these within seconds. Shipping them unedited costs trust and moves the editing work from the writer to the reader.

The pattern

Run a humanizer pass on every AI-assisted draft before you read it yourself. The pass strips the generic patterns mechanically, so your own review starts at a higher level: you spend your attention on substance and voice instead of cleanup.
  1. Draft with whatever AI tool you use — the pattern works with any of them.
  2. Run a de-AI pass: a prompt or installable skill that removes the known patterns listed above.
  3. Read the full text yourself and edit until it sounds like you.
  4. Send or publish it under your name. You are the author; the AI was a tool.
Decision test: could you read every sentence aloud to a colleague and defend it? If not, rewrite or cut it.

What to use

All free, and the pass takes about a minute per document:
  • A copy-paste prompt that works in any chatbot — build one from the pattern catalogue below, or adapt an existing one.
  • An installable skill for assistants that support them (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Codex), so the pass runs without pasting.
  • Pattern catalogues to adapt or check against: Wikipedia's Signs of AI writing , Simon Willison's LLM cliché highlighter , and the open-source humanizer skill .
These tools improve AI-assisted prose. They do not detect whether AI wrote a document, and that is not their job.

What's mandatory regardless

  • Never send or publish text you have not read in full. The humanizer pass comes before your read, not instead of it.
  • You own the result, errors included. "The AI wrote that" is never an excuse.
  • The pass fixes style, not facts. Check claims, numbers, and names yourself.
  • Follow your organization's disclosure norms where authorship matters (grant applications, legal and board documents).

Your variation

Record as your organization's own choice: which prompt or skill you standardize on, which document types require the pass (all external text? internal too?), and your disclosure norm for AI-assisted documents.