Humanizing AI text is an editing job, not a prompt trick. First, protect what the draft needs to say. Then remove the wording that could have been written about almost anything. These five edits work whether you make them by hand or use the free editor.
An AI draft can be grammatical and still feel generic. The goal is not to disguise its origin. It is to make sure the final version is accurate, specific, and something you would put your name on.
Start with what must stay true
Treat the first output as a starting point. Before changing its style, identify the claims, details, and qualifications the draft must keep.
Review time belongs in any estimate of time saved. METR’s 2025 controlled study found that experienced open-source developers expected AI to make them 24% faster on the studied tasks; with early-2025 tools, they took 19% longer. The study concerns coding, not writing, so it cannot estimate how much time an editor will save.
Check the details against the source
Compare names, numbers, quotations, links, and key claims with the source before you polish the prose.
Rewrites can quietly drop a name, number, quote, or link. If you use Zero Slop, it also compares figures, quotations, code, tables, file paths, and headings exactly, and warns when an edit adds or drops one of them.
Exact checks cannot catch every change in meaning. A sentence can preserve its numbers while changing scope, certainty, or cause. Compare the claim with its source yourself. See how to check an AI edit for examples of changes a score can miss.
Listen for the flat parts
Read the draft aloud. Repetition, weak transitions, and a uniform pace are often easier to hear than to see.
A study of human- and model-generated text found that sentence lengths varied more in human writing than in the model-generated samples. That is a useful cue for revision, not a rule that every sentence should vary.
If every sentence takes the same breath, change the pace. Keep the longer sentence when it carries a needed detail or qualification. Fix the places where you stumble or have to reread.
Trade generic language for specifics
Cut language that could describe any company, product, or project. Keep the details that belong to yours.
Replace portable prose with the figure, mechanism, date, constraint, or mistake that belongs to this story. If you do not have that substance, delete the sentence or ask for it.
Here is an illustrative edit from the home page:
“We’re thrilled to announce that our team has leveraged cutting-edge AI to deliver a seamless onboarding experience, cutting setup time by 40%.”
“We cut onboarding setup time by 40% using AI.”
Use a score as a prompt to review
Review the score and each flagged passage, then compare the edit with the source. A lower score is not proof that the meaning survived.
Use the score to compare versions of a draft, not to identify the author. In a public replay of our AI Slop test corpus, this workflow moved deliberately obvious drafts from a mean of 76.3 to 12.8 while preserving the tracked source details. The method, saved results, and limits are public.
The score includes 294 weighted phrase patterns and a 96-term watchlist. It checks sentence variety, then flags readability and formatting problems. That includes comma pileups, sentences past 38 words, emoji, heavy bolding, and frequent dashes. Each finding points back to the draft. The formula and limits are in Anatomy of the slop score.
What this does not do
Zero Slop does not help you evade AI detectors. The RAID benchmark tested 12 detectors on more than six million generations and found weaknesses across attacks and unfamiliar models. If a school, journal, or employer asks you to disclose AI assistance, disclose it.
The workflow is simple: protect the claim, add the detail only you can supply, and read the result as the person who will receive it. The tool can flag a passage; the final judgment is yours.