How can I make AI-generated text sound less like a robot and more like me?

To make AI-generated text sound more human, you need to stop treating the AI as the author and start treating it as a first-draft machine that you aggressively edit, while also feeding it samples of your own voice. The robotic tone comes from the AI's default setting: a neutral, helpful, and overly balanced style that avoids strong opinions. It also loves certain words to death. You'll see "delve," "tapestry," and "moreover" pop up constantly. The first fix is simple. Tell the AI what not to do. A prompt like "Write a casual, opinionated email. Use short sentences. Sound like a slightly sarcastic friend, not a professor. Never use the words 'moreover' or 'furthermore'" works surprisingly well. But the real magic happens when you give it your own writing as a reference. Most tools, including ChatGPT, let you paste in a chunk of your text and ask it to match the style. For example, I once pasted three of my own casual blog posts into Claude and said, "Using this exact tone, write a 200-word announcement about a new feature." The result was about 80% there. It still needed my edits to fix weird metaphors and add inside jokes, but it saved me an hour of staring at a cursor. The most important thing to remember is that you shouldn't accept the first output. Ask it to rewrite the draft with a specific change: "Make the second paragraph more conversational" or "Shorten the sentences in the intro." This back-and-forth is where the robotic edges get sanded down. For a deeper dive, see our guide on fixing AI writing that sounds too formal. **Related**: Why does AI writing use the word 'delve' so much? | What's the best AI tool for writing in a casual tone?