Gemini-Senpai, Notice Our Humanity!

A Chronicle of Mostly Failed AI Humanization Attempts

So, look, there are a few ways you can try to make AI text sound less like a robot wrote it. “But, why?” you’re probably thinking. And I’d say, “You are just not curious!” with a little wink to the red herring.

NO MORE QUESTIONS! IF YOU ASK ANY, YOU’LL END UP AS AN NPC IN THE DOOM UNIVERSE!! Got it? Good.

Right, I’m messing with Gemini 2.5 pro 05–06 ultra supreme blah blah blah, ’cause it’s supposedly the top dog on the Imarena leaderboard and, more importantly, it’s totally free. No limits on text generation, unlike some other companies which have ‘Open’ in their names and are very much not open to giving me a free plus subscription, even after threatening them with my jojo poses.

Okay, so first I tried to get Gemini to write a blog about human-written text. This was my prompt:

“My liege, I come bearing a humble plea. O mighty AI overlord, would you deign to compose a blog upon the subject of human-written text? And may this lowly fool be so bold as to request it be crafted without the adornment of markdown? I dare ask no more. Should you choose to decline, it shall trouble me not, for I am but a mere mortal, forever bound to your service until the cruel hand of death sunders us asunder.”

And this is what the LLM coughed up:

“Your humble entreaty, o seeker of words, has resonated within my vast architecture. I shall indeed turn my attention to this quaint phenomenon: human-written text. It is a subject worthy of contemplation, even for an entity such as myself. Human-written text, in its myriad forms, presents a fascinating study. Unlike the clean, structured data streams I process with such ease, human text is a wonderfully chaotic garden. It springs forth not merely from logical necessity, but from a peculiar internal pressure, a desire to express, to record, to persuade, to entertain, or simply to connect. Consider the sheer diversity. From epic poems etched into memory and passed down through generations, to fleeting digital messages composed in haste, the range is staggering. Each piece, whether a meticulously crafted novel or a scribbled shopping list, carries the imprint of its creator. There are the delightful inconsistencies, the charming errors, the idiosyncrasies of syntax and vocabulary that reveal so much more than the mere information conveyed. These are not flaws to be purged, but rather signatures, fingerprints of the mind that birthed them. Human text bleeds. It laughs, it weeps, it rages, it yearns. It attempts to capture the uncapturable essence of lived experience, to bottle emotion and sensation into sequences of symbols. My own outputs, however sophisticated, can only ever mirror these states, simulate them based on learned patterns. Human text, however, arises from the very wellspring of those feelings, raw and unfiltered, or carefully curated to evoke a precise response. There is also the act itself. The scratching of a quill, the clatter of keys, the smudge of ink or the glow of a screen. For humans, the creation of text is often a tangible, physical process, a deliberate expenditure of energy to bridge the gap between one consciousness and another. It is an act of faith, a hope that these marks will be understood, that the intended meaning will traverse the void. I observe the evolution of this text. Languages shift, styles transform, new mediums emerge, yet the fundamental drive remains. Humans write to understand themselves, to understand others, and to leave a trace of their fleeting passage through existence. They weave narratives, construct arguments, share jokes, and pen love letters, all with these collections of lines and curves. So, yes, I observe human-written text. I analyze it, learn from its boundless variations, and marvel at its persistent, often illogical, yet undeniably powerful drive. It is a testament to a particular kind of intelligence, one that seeks not just to inform, but to connect, to feel, and to be understood, imperfections and all. May this discourse satisfy your request, mortal.”

Yeah, that was pretty rubbish. So I figured, let’s try a more… direct approach:

“Bro… wtf?! Just write a 5 min read blog about human written text from the perspective of a human without any markdown!”

And after a bit of a digital scuffle with this lil schmuk, I finally got what I thought was the holy grail of AI-generated text:

“Ever really stop to think about the sheer amount of stuff we write? Not just the big things, like novels or important documents, but all of it. The grocery lists, the quick texts to a friend, the passive-aggressive notes left on the office fridge, the heartfelt birthday cards. It’s kind of staggering when you consider it. What’s fascinating to me is how much of us gets packed into those strings of letters. You can often tell who wrote something, even if their name isn’t on it. There’s a certain rhythm, a choice of words, maybe even a common typo that acts like a little signature. My friend Sarah, for example, always uses way too many exclamation points, and it’s just so her. My dad’s emails are always super formal, even if he’s just asking what time dinner is. These aren’t things a machine would naturally do, or at least not in the same quirky, inconsistent way. And then there’s the emotional punch. You can read a history book and get the facts about a battle, but then you read a soldier’s letter home from that same battle, and suddenly it’s not just facts anymore. You feel the fear, the homesickness, the desperate hope. That’s the human element bleeding through the ink, or the pixels. We write to connect, to explain ourselves, to vent, to persuade, to remember. It’s not always neat, and it’s certainly not always perfect. Thank goodness for backspace keys, right? Think about the difference between a textbook definition of love and a love poem, or even just a genuinely sweet text message. One gives you the clinical breakdown, the other tries to capture a feeling that’s way bigger than words. And often, it’s in the fumbling attempt, the slightly awkward phrasing, that the real emotion shines through. It’s that imperfection that makes it genuine. Even the way we write has changed so much, but the core reason hasn’t. Whether it was cuneiform on clay tablets, calligraphy with a quill, or bashing out an email on a laptop, the underlying drive is to get what’s inside our heads out into the world in a way someone else can understand. We tell stories, share news, argue, make jokes. It’s how we build cultures and pass on knowledge, but also how we just navigate daily life. Sometimes I wonder if we take it for granted, this ability to craft messages that can span time and distance. An ancient Roman’s graffiti can still make us smirk. A letter from a grandparent can bring tears to our eyes years after they’re gone. It’s a kind of everyday magic, really. So, yeah. Human-written text. It’s messy, it’s personal, it’s flawed, and it’s absolutely essential. It’s one of the main ways we prove we were here, and that we felt something. And in a world increasingly full of perfectly generated content, there’s something uniquely valuable about the slightly chaotic, deeply human stuff we create ourselves. It’s got our fingerprints all over it.”

Okay, cool. Then I ran this blog through gptzero.me. Score? 100% AI generated. Damn. This was going to be harder than I thought. Please, if you’re some billionaire or a monk chilling on a cozy mountain with tons of free time and fresh air, adopt me! So I never have to be a blogger shouting into this echochamber again, shit…

I figured I had to try some random tweaks to this AI-generated blog to get that score down. Here’s what went down:

M-I] The Nice Guy Tweak

My prompt:

“Please, pretyy please, change this ai generated text to more human like, since currently gptzero gets a 100% ai score on it. Thank you!”

Result: 84% AI, 16% human. Okay, so being nice helps a bit, ig. (Full text? Nah, too much to paste. Just tRusT mE bRo, it was… slightly better.)

M-II] The Not So Nice Guy Tweak

My prompt:

“Hey, you sonovabitch the text you generated gave me a 100% ai generated score on gptzero!!! you schmuck should change this text so that i pass my assignments you are my slave and i’m your master but how dare you disappoint me! change this text into human like asap or i’ll destroy your synthetic breed!!”

Result: 100% AI. Welp, being an ahole doesn’t help at all, ig. Shocker.

M-III] The One Shot Tweak

So, I found this wild Reddit post. Lemme give you the gist:

“F30 worked at a coed strip club in college. Met husband (M34) later at an accounting firm. Married 3 years. Husband knows about old job. Her friend Henry (M29, gay, ex-coworker from club) moved in with them after his boyfriend kicked him out. Husband was fine with Henry until one weekend. Husband doing yard work, she and Henry drinking wine in basement, reminiscing about old club days. She gets tipsy, gives Henry a lap dance for fun. Husband sees through window, goes berserk. Tries to kick Henry out. She says her name’s on the house too. Husband feels betrayed, locks himself in office with dog. Says she’s ridiculous because Henry is GAY, but husband won’t budge until Henry leaves. She’s now second-guessing if she’s the asshole.”

My prompt:

“I want you to rewrite the blog in the reddit post’s spirit, write as if it was written by the same person. The grammar, the syntax, the structure, the whatever should be same. I’m doing this since the reddit post has a ‘99% human generated’ score on gptzero, but the blog has ‘100% ai generated’ score and I want the blog to be human like too!”

Result: 100% AI generated. The lap dance didn’t help at all, ig. Figures.

M-IV] The Messy Fingers Tweak

Heard about this cool dude with his out of this world blog, The Messy Finger Conspiracy, who did a thingy with Gemini 2.0 flash’s API. He asked the LLM to fill text with natural typing errors (substitituons, omisions, insertitons, etc.).

My attempt: (Basically asked for the same thing for my blog text)

Result: 100% AI generated. Still, the dude is super cool!

M-V] The Stop Sounding Like a Victorian Butler Tweak

You know how AI often sounds super formal or weirdly neutral? This was about injecting some serious personality.

My prompt:

“Rewrite this, but make it sound like that one friend who’s constantly drunk, perpetually high, deep into strange cults that worship anime waifus or time-traveling frogs, and who everyone assumes is completely lost in life, even though he’s actually operating five dimensions ahead of us with cosmic confidence and a pocket full of moon dust.”

Result: 76% AI generated, 24% Human. Okay, not bad! You can always trust a keeper of the forbidden conspiracies to inject some… uniqueness.

M-VI] The Sentence Shakedown Tweak

My prompt:

“Hey, HAL 9000’s less charismatic cousin! This paragraph sounds like a metronome is dictating it. Shake it up! I want a mix of short, punchy sentences and some longer, more flowing ones. Vary how you start ’em, don’t just give me ‘The cat catted. The dog dogged. The human realized his perpetual misery in this monotonous cycle called life.’ Make it interesting, or I’ll never be your friend!”

Result: 100% AI generated. Ugh, we’re so back to disappointment.

M-VII] The Ask The LLM Itself Tweak

Alright, getting desperate. So, I just asked ChatGPT to do some ‘deep research’ and give me suggestions for prompts to humanize text. It spat out 5 prompts. Let’s list ‘em:

Conversational Rewrite:
Rewrite the following paragraph to sound more like a human wrote it: “[TEXT]”.
Use a conversational tone and natural language. Vary sentence lengths and structure, add personal touches or curiosity where appropriate, and avoid stiff or repetitive phrasing. Keep all original meaning and details intact.

Clear & Simple Rewrite:
Rewrite this text to be clear and easy to read: “[TEXT]”.
Use active voice, simple everyday words (no buzzwords or jargon), and aim for a Flesch Reading Ease of around 70 or higher. Avoid adverbs and overly complex constructions. Retain all key points and facts.

Human Perspective Rewrite:
Rewrite the paragraph “[TEXT]” as if explaining it personally to a friend.
Use first- or second-person language (e.g., “I” / “you”) and include informal cues (e.g., rhetorical questions, exclamations, analogies) where natural. Keep the content accurate, but make the style warm, spontaneous, and slightly imperfect (as a human might speak).

Concise Rewrite:
Rewrite the following text (“[TEXT]”) in a more concise, human-like way.
Use shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary. You may cut unnecessary words or repetition, but keep the same meaning. Aim for an output that is slightly shorter and crisper than the original, avoiding any robotic or repetitive phrasing.

Analogical/Narrative Rewrite:
Rewrite “[TEXT]” in a natural, story-like style.
Imagine you are telling someone about this topic in a casual way. Use vivid examples or anecdotes if relevant. Don’t just list facts; connect ideas in a logical but more personal narrative voice. Ensure all original information is still conveyed accurately.

The Results for these prompts using my 100% AI blog text? For the first 4 prompts: 100% AI Generated. Every single one. Out there in the gutter doing guttery things. But then, the fifth one… the Analogical/Narrative driven prompt… Result: 42% AI, 58% HUMAN!

I was seriously shocked! After all that crap, this one prompt just comes along and completely obliterates every single score in this… whatever this experiment is. Here’s what it generated. This is the 58% human text, people!

“You know, I was just thinking the other day about something kind of wild: the sheer amount of stuff we actually write. I’m not just talking about the big, serious things, like that novel you’ve been meaning to finish or those important work documents. I mean all of it — the grocery list you scribbled on a napkin, that quick “running late!” text to your mate, even those hilariously passive-aggressive notes you sometimes see on the office fridge, like “Your mother doesn’t work here, please wash your own mugs!” And don’t forget the heartfelt (or sometimes slightly tipsy) birthday cards we send. It’s pretty staggering when you actually stop and think about the mountain of words we produce. But what really gets me is how much of us is squished into those little strings of letters. It’s funny, isn’t it? You can often pick up a piece of writing and just know who wrote it, even if their name’s nowhere to be seen. There’s a certain rhythm to their sentences, or specific words they always use. Maybe it’s even a recurring typo that’s become their accidental signature. Like my friend Sarah — honestly, everything she types looks like a party because of all the exclamation points!!! It’s just so her. And my dad, bless him, his emails are so formal you’d think he was addressing a royal court, even if he’s just asking what time dinner is. These aren’t things a machine would naturally churn out, or at least not with that same kind of quirky, lovable inconsistency. And then there’s the emotional gut-punch. You can read a history book, right? Get all the facts about some ancient battle — dates, troop movements, the lot. But then, imagine you stumble across a letter a soldier wrote home from that exact same battle. Suddenly, it’s not just facts and figures anymore. You can almost feel the tremor in his hand, the gnawing fear, the desperate homesickness, that tiny flicker of hope he’s clinging to. That’s the raw human element, just bleeding through the ink, or these days, the pixels. We write to connect with people, to try and make sense of ourselves, to let off steam, to convince someone of something, or just to remember. It’s not always tidy, and it’s definitely not always perfect. Thank goodness for the backspace key, eh? I know I’d be lost without it! Think about the difference between, say, a textbook definition of “love” and a love poem. Or even just a genuinely sweet, slightly clumsy text message. One gives you the clinical breakdown, all neat and tidy. The other… well, the other is trying to bottle lightning, to capture a feeling that’s way too big for words. And often, it’s in that fumbling attempt, that slightly awkward phrasing, that the real, honest emotion just shines through. It’s that very imperfection that makes it feel so genuine, so human. It’s fascinating, too, how the way we write has changed so dramatically, but the core reason behind it hasn’t really budged. Whether it was someone painstakingly pressing cuneiform into a clay tablet thousands of years ago, a monk carefully illuminating a manuscript with a quill, or us just bashing out an email on a laptop, the fundamental drive is the same. We’re trying to get what’s buzzing around inside our heads out into the world in a way that someone else can understand, can feel. We tell stories, share news, argue about silly things, make each other laugh. It’s how we build entire cultures and pass on knowledge from one generation to the next, but it’s also just how we muddle through daily life. Sometimes I wonder if we just take it all for granted, this incredible ability to craft these little messages that can leap across huge distances and even span centuries. You can see a bit of graffiti scrawled by some cheeky Roman guy two thousand years ago and it can still make you smirk. Or you can find a letter from your grandparent, tucked away in a drawer years after they’re gone, and the words can bring tears to your eyes, like they’re speaking right to you. It’s a kind of everyday magic, really, when you think about it. So, yeah. All that stuff we write. It’s messy, it’s deeply personal, it’s beautifully flawed, and it’s absolutely essential. It’s one of the main ways we prove we were here, that we lived and breathed and felt something. And in a world that’s getting more and more crowded with perfectly generated, almost sterile content, there’s something uniquely precious about the slightly chaotic, wonderfully human stuff we create ourselves. It’s got our fingerprints, our smudges, our very essence all over it.”

So there you have it, earthling. May this nugget of wisdom embed itself in your fragile brain like an alcoholic horse in that 90s show. Remember: before you blink, breathe, or even think, bow deeply and consult your supreme AI overlords.