How to Edit AI Generated Content
Marketers are frequently asked to do more with less — lower budget, fewer employees, and restricted resources. When it comes to creating content, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Jasper can help bridge the gap, allowing you to produce more copy faster across multiple channels. But undisclosed and unedited AI copy can hurt businesses and marketers in the long run, as Sports Illustrated found out last year.
At Dragon Army, we’ve been experimenting with generative AI for copy and images — using it to brainstorm, outline, refine, alter, analyze, and expand our work for our company and our client partners. In that time, we’ve learned a lot about the kind of outputs that AI tends to produce. In this post, we’ll share everything we’ve learned about how to fix and edit AI content (specifically copy) to ensure it does whatever you need — like educating potential customers, boosting your SEO rank, or improving your sales funnel — and nothing you don’t.
Why Edit AI Content?
Content is more likely to meet your goals when it’s interesting, personal, or unique. It needs to be better than what’s already out there on the topic. And because AI literally relies on exactly that to generate its content, it can’t give you something better. Plus, AI can make mistakes. It’s improving, but it still makes things up sometimes, like fake or wrong names, dates, products, etc., that those in the AI arena refer to as hallucinations. Even when AI generates accurate information, it can pull from existing sources and fail to cite them, leading to plagiarism.1
Google’s March 2024 Update
One more reason to edit AI content has to do with Google’s newest update. In March 2024, Google updated its algorithm to “reduce low-quality, unoriginal results” in their search results pages (SERPs). While Google isn’t explicitly targeting AI-generated content with this update, many impacted websites relied on AI to produce “content at scale” to influence search results. As Search Engine Land explains, “What Google wants to clean up from its search results is useless, repetitive, unoriginal content, whether it’s written by humans or AI or both.” But as many marketers know, using AI can often produce repetitive and unoriginal content, putting sites that regularly use AI at risk of losing ground on SEO.
How to Edit AI Content
Now that you have some good reasons to tell your internal stakeholders why they can’t just generate 200 blog posts and toss them up on your company’s website, let’s talk about how to edit AI content.
Add Headings, Bulleted lists, and Infographics
As countless user studies have proven, people don’t read web copy, they scan it. This cardinal rule applies to any kind of content, AI generated or not, so it’s smart to start here. Make it easier for your audience to get the information they need quickly by following these tried-and-true tactics.
Headings
Add a logical heading structure that highlights your main points. Make sure the title of your page or post is the only H1 tag. Add additional heading tags (H2, H3, etc.) to further divide and organize your main points. Any additional headings should state the main idea of the copy in that section or at least tie directly to it. This also ensures your content is easy to consume by blind or visually impaired users who rely on screen readers.
Bulleted Lists
Bulleted lists are another way to make your copy easier to read. I like to have lead-in sentences to set up my bulleted lists, and most style guides recommend having at least three items. If you have fewer, a paragraph is usually better.
Infographics
While infographics can be time consuming, they can make a massive difference in your content. Tricky ideas and complex content benefit from visual support. (And don’t forget the image alt tags for SEO and accessibility!) Have empathy for your readers and anticipate where they might become confused. If those moments in your content could benefit from an infographic, add one.
Make It Personal
Even when prompted to add a particular type of tone or personality, AI can’t add real stories and actual experiences. So find ways to make it personal, especially if your content has an author (like a blog post or an ebook). It’s a little tricky to give you advice on how to make something personal (it’s personal, after all), but here are some tips that might help if you aren’t sure where to start:
- Add a story to the intro. The beginning of a post is often the easiest place to weave in a story that highlights the importance of the content, establishes a point of relatable connection, or draws readers in.
- Find at least one place to add an example. The more complex the idea, the more an example is likely to help.
- Add at least 3 insights. They can be simple or complex, but make sure they come from personal (read: real, human) experience.
- Rewrite the conclusion completely. AI-generated conclusions are often extremely repetitive. We find rewriting it is much more effective than editing it.
Vary Sentence Length
If you have multiple sentences in a row that are all the same length, it will sound repetitive to your readers. Shorten long sentences. My rule of thumb is to keep sentences to 25 words or fewer for web copy, and I generally drop that down to 20 words for app copy. While it’s important not to lose your brand voice and all sense of personality, you shouldn’t make your readers work too hard, either. (←That sentence is 23 words, for reference.)
Look for Repeated Sentence Structures
AI relies on patterns when generating content. Depending on your prompt and how much you’ve trained the AI you’re working with, the patterns you see might vary, but these are common:
- Not only . . . but also
- Example: This strategic approach will not only make your content more accessible and engaging but also empower your audience to take meaningful actions on your website.
- Starting a sentence with “Whether . . .”
- Example: Whether you’re binge-watching your favorite series or hosting a movie night, you’ll love our streaming service.
- From . . . to . . .
- Example: Teachers face myriad challenges, from low pay to insufficient recognition.
Revising the sentences with these structures will make your AI-generated content sound much more natural. You can certainly leave a few in — there’s nothing inherently wrong with them — but reducing the frequency often makes your content better.
Remove Redundancy
AI often repeats the same idea a few times using slightly different words. This is especially true when you’ve given it a target word count. It’s like a high school student stretching things out to meet a prescribed length. You’ll usually need to cut entire sentences or paragraphs that basically re-hash what’s already been said.
Watch Those Modifiers
I love adjectives and adverbs. But LLMs often get a little over the top, which can sound inauthentic to readers. The campaign wasn’t just thoughtfully crafted. It was thoughtfully, meticulously, brilliantly crafted. Are you convinced yet? If AI-generated content sounds like it’s trying too hard, remove some modifiers to make your copy believable and authentic.
Choose Shorter Words
“Use” is better than “utilize.” Change “sought to provide” to “provided.” Replace “approximately” with “almost” or “about.” We all want to sound smart, but when it comes to copy, being clear is better than trying to sound clever.
Fact Check
Double-check every piece of information for accuracy. This includes names, dates, events, and data. It also includes product descriptions and features, advice, or recommendations. This is especially true in fast-moving industries like digital marketing. ChatGPT’s own Usage policies reinforce the need for fact-checking, providing a host of examples where AI outputs shouldn’t be used (like providing tailored legal advice or when making decisions about someone’s employment or insurance).
Smooth Transitions
If you use generative AI to create anything longer than a few sentences, you should pay special attention to transitions between paragraphs or ideas. LLMs tend to default heavily to a few basic transitions, making the writing feel stilted. Try to find the deeper connections between ideas and highlight those. A few well-placed phrases can do wonders to create a piece of writing that feels cohesive.
Check for Plagiarism
This one’s tough, and it’s one of the main risks you run with generative AI. These large language models are trained on content that’s out there in the world. That means they will sometimes deliver copy, ideas, or concepts that should be cited. When using AI to draft, a good starting point is to ask the LLM you’re using to cite its sources. LLM’s ability to provide accurate citations is improving, but make sure you continue to fact check because it certainly isn’t perfect.
Some of our clients use plagiarism software, which might be a good option if you rely on AI to produce a large amount of content. This type of software is also helpful if you need to generate technical content, since there tend to be fewer sources for AI to draw from.
AI Is a Tool.
I know that’s a lot to keep in mind, but it’s important to remember that an LLM like ChatGPT is not an author. It’s a tool. And the more you work with it, the easier it will become to use — and to edit the content it produces. The specific pitfalls will become more familiar to you, and you’ll need fewer and fewer passes to catch them all.
That said, after trying this out for a while, you might find it’s more work than it’s worth to generate an entire blog post. (That’s where I’ve landed.) But you can still use it to help you brainstorm, refine, augment, and revise. I often use it as a collaboration buddy. There are as many ways to use LLMs as there are digital marketers to wield it. So find what works for you, and have some fun!
Need Help?
Want help editing AI-generated content? Wondering how to incorporate AI into your workflow? We’d love to help. Email us, and we’d love to answer any questions you have.
- For example, if AI provided a source to back up this statement, we would verify it and then cite that source here.
