Humanize My Essay
Background
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing has sparked ongoing debate about its role, usefulness, and limitations within higher education, mainly because it promotes communication incompetence and research insufficiency among students. In response to institutional concerns, many users attempt to “humanize” AI essays by adding emotion, personal tone, or stylistic variation to make them appear more authentic. According to Bearman et al. (2023), the practice of humanizing essays raises important questions about originality, reasoning, and the true nature of human writing.
While humanization may improve surface-level readability, it does not address the deeper intellectual processes that define meaningful academic work, such as critical thinking, lived experience, and intentional argument development. The growing effort to disguise AI writing, therefore, reveals more about its shortcomings than its strengths within scholarly contexts. This essay explores why AI-generated essays remain fundamentally unequal to human-written work, even after attempts at humanization, by critically examining their logic, originality, and academic purpose.
AI Essays – A summary
AI essay tools generate written content by predicting words and sentences based on patterns learned from large datasets. They analyze prompts, identify key topics, and produce structured responses that resemble academic writing. In practice, these tools are very good at organizing ideas, maintaining grammatical accuracy, and following standard essay conventions such as introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions. They can summarize information, rephrase existing ideas, and present arguments in a clear and neutral tone. For many users, the output looks complete and polished enough to submit with little effort, saving time while reducing the cognitive load of drafting, editing, and formatting academic work, especially under tight deadlines and overall expectations.
Students often resort to AI essay tools due to the pressure of academic life. Tight deadlines, heavy workloads, and fear of poor grades make quick solutions appealing. AI tools promise efficiency and convenience, allowing students to generate content within minutes rather than hours. Some students also view these tools as academic support, especially when they struggle to start an essay or organize their thoughts. In this sense, AI can feel like a shortcut through stress and uncertainty, offering reassurance, structure, and temporary relief when motivation is low. It becomes especially appealing when expectations feel overwhelming during challenging semesters and high-stakes assessments that demand consistent performance from already exhausted learners everywhere today.
However, despite their fluency, AI essay tools do not actually think. Dergaa et al. (2023) highlight that AI tools do not understand the topics they write about, nor do they form opinions, question assumptions, or reflect on personal experiences. They lack intention, meaning they do not decide why an argument matters or what stance to take beyond what seems statistically appropriate. As a result, AI essays may sound correct, but they remain surface-level representations of knowledge rather than genuine expressions of critical engagement. This difference explains why AI writing often feels complete yet hollow when readers closely examine it, expecting reasoning, personal insight, and genuine intellectual effort behind the words.
Humanizing an AI Essay – What it means
Humanizing an AI essay usually happens because writers recognize that AI output, on its own, often feels mechanical and detached. People humanize AI writing mainly to make it appear acceptable within academic environments where originality, voice, and personal reasoning are valued. Fear also plays a role, including fear of detection software, academic penalties, and being perceived as dishonest or disengaged. As Baron (2023) notes, by adding a human touch, students hope to reduce suspicion and meet institutional expectations without having to start from scratch. In many cases, humanization is not about deepening meaning, but about improving appearance. The focus shifts toward making the text sound as though someone genuinely engaged with the ideas, rather than simply generating content through a tool.
The changes made during humanization are usually stylistic rather than intellectual. Writers often rewrite sentences to vary their length, soften formal language, or introduce a more conversational tone. The added personal examples, reflective comments, or emotional cues are to create the impression of lived experience. Some deliberately insert small imperfections, such as minor grammatical slips or informal transitions, to avoid sounding overly polished. Others reorganize paragraphs so the essay feels less symmetrical and more naturally developed. These edits attempt to mimic how humans actually write, with inconsistency, emphasis, and individual rhythm. However, the underlying ideas often remain unchanged, meaning the argument stays broad and surface-level. Humanization, therefore, acts as a cosmetic process, shaping how the essay sounds rather than how it thinks.
The need to humanize AI essays reveals important truths about how AI writes by default. AI typically produces language that is smooth, balanced, and emotionally neutral because it relies on patterns rather than perspective. Its writing rarely shows hesitation, struggle, or personal investment, which are common features of genuine human expression. As a result, AI essays often feel interchangeable, as though they could belong to anyone. Attempts to humanize such writing show that AI does not generate meaning through experience or reflection. Instead, it assembles probable phrases without understanding why arguments matter. The effort required to add voice and authenticity highlights a clear limitation: AI can imitate academic structure, but it cannot replicate the reasoning that gives writing purpose (Baron, 2023).
Humanize My Essay – Potluck or Possible
Many students believe that humanizing an AI essay works because surface-level changes can successfully mask its origin. When personal language, varied sentence lengths, and reflective phrases are added, the writing often feels more natural to casual readers. Instructors who skim for clarity rather than depth may not immediately notice anything unusual. Humanization can also help align the essay with assignment instructions by inserting examples, opinions, or contextual details that AI initially omitted. For this reason, some view humanizing as a practical collaboration, where AI provides a foundation and the student adds a human layer that completes the work. This approach appears efficient, especially under pressure, reinforcing the belief that humanized AI writing is sufficient for academic submission.
Despite these beliefs, humanizing an AI essay often fails when examined closely. Under scrutiny, the writing may lack a clear argumentative direction or show shallow engagement with the topic. Shabir (2025) notes that ideas may be presented correctly but without justification or development across paragraphs. Human edits cannot easily supply genuine reasoning if it was never present in the original output. Markers trained to assess critical thinking notice repetition, vague claims, and an absence of intellectual risk (Aboodi, 2025). Over time, familiar patterns also emerge across different submissions, making humanized AI essays easier to recognize than expected. This limitation exposes how style adjustments cannot replace the deeper processes involved in constructing knowledge-based academic arguments that require sustained analytical effort.
In my view, humanizing an AI essay is possible only at a superficial level and should not be mistaken for genuine authorship. While editing can improve clarity and tone, it cannot create understanding where none exists. Academic writing is not merely about sounding human, but about demonstrating how ideas were questioned, connected, and evaluated. When AI provides the core content, the student’s role becomes more corrective than intellectual. This exposure suggests that humanization does not elevate AI writing to a human level; it simply conceals its limitations. Therefore, relying on humanization undermines learning by prioritizing appearance over authentic thinking. True academic growth depends on struggle, intention, and ownership, none of which can be generated artificially by systems alone.
The circular reasoning in humanizing an AI Essay
The idea of humanizing AI essays exposes a clear form of circular reasoning that weakens the claim that AI can function as an independent academic writer. If AI-generated essays were already sufficient for educational purposes, there would be no need to revise or disguise them (Alghazo et al., 2025). The very act of modification suggests an underlying inadequacy. Students do not humanize essays that already meet expectations; they humanize work that feels incomplete or unnatural. This act creates a contradiction in which AI is presented as capable yet simultaneously treated as insufficient. The process itself becomes evidence that AI output lacks something essential that academic writing demands beyond coherence and correctness.
This contradiction becomes clearer when examining where value is actually added. While AI may produce a draft, the meaningful improvements come from human judgment. Humans decide what ideas matter, which arguments need emphasis, and where clarification is required. They inject context, perspective, and relevance based on understanding the assignment and audience. AI contributes structure and language patterns, but it does not evaluate the quality of its reasoning or the strength of its claims. Therefore, the intellectual value does not originate from the AI but from the human who reshapes the work. Calling this collaboration obscures the reality that the human remains responsible for making the essay academically valid.
This obscuration leads to the question of whether AI truly reduces academic work or merely relocates it. While AI may shorten the drafting stage, it simultaneously increases the burden of evaluation, correction, and justification. Students must dedicate time to identifying weaknesses, adding depth, clarifying arguments, and ensuring originality in the final submission. The effort effectively shifts from active thinking during the writing process to repairing and refining content that was generated without deliberate thought. As a result, AI does not eliminate intellectual labour; it merely postpones it. This cyclical process highlights that AI relies on human reasoning, proving that thoughtful, deliberate, and critical thinking remains essential and irreplaceable in academics.
The risk of content duplication (regurgitation) in AI essays
AI-generated essays carry a significant risk of content duplication due to their reliance on pattern-based writing. These tools produce text by analyzing vast datasets of existing work and predicting the most statistically likely sequence of words. While this allows for coherent and grammatically correct output, it also means that many essays on similar topics will share the same structures, phrasing, and examples. Even when prompts are slightly varied, the AI often recycles common expressions or widely accepted arguments, creating subtle repetition across multiple submissions. This reliance on patterns undermines the uniqueness of the content, making it more formulaic than a human-written essay would naturally be (Elasmi, 2025).
Another consequence of AI’s approach is the prevalence of generic arguments. Since AI does not possess understanding or personal perspective, the ideas it presents are often broad, neutral, and minimally analytical. For instance, essays may summarize information accurately but fail to challenge assumptions, evaluate sources critically, or explore nuanced interpretations. Students who attempt to humanize the work may add minor adjustments, but the core ideas remain predictable and widely used. This generic quality makes the essay feel impersonal and superficial, lacking the depth or originality expected in academic settings. Readers who engage with such writing can quickly recognize its formulaic nature, which diminishes the perceived credibility of the work.
The combination of pattern-based writing and generic arguments leads to a clear loss of originality, which carries real academic consequences. Essays that appear overly similar to others or rely on recycled ideas risk being flagged for plagiarism, whether intentional or accidental. Even without detection, instructors may grade such work lower due to its lack of critical engagement or unique perspective. This grading undermines the primary purpose of academic assignments, which is to develop independent thinking and demonstrate genuine understanding. In essence, the use of AI-generated content may produce surface-level correctness. Still, it cannot replace authentic intellectual effort, and the repetitive nature of its output exposes students to both ethical and evaluative risks.
The Student’s Responsibility in an AI-Driven Academic Environment
Before turning to AI for academic writing, students must clearly understand their objectives. AI can be a helpful tool during the early stages, such as brainstorming ideas, organizing outlines, or improving language clarity for non-native speakers. In these limited roles, it may reduce anxiety and help writers get started. However, AI becomes harmful when used for critical analysis, reflective writing, or ethical reasoning, where independent thought is essential. Tutors design Assignments to build reasoning, judgment, and personal voice, not simply to generate text. When AI replaces these processes, students miss the learning objectives, and skill development is weakened rather than supported, as they seek efficiency without considering the term’s academic consequences.
Attempts to humanize AI essays reveal a fundamental paradox within academic writing. The more effort invested in editing AI output to appear authentic, the more obvious its limitations become. Humanization does not correct the absence of reasoning, intention, or experience; it merely masks it temporarily. This practice reveals that AI depends on human intervention to achieve academic credibility. If the writer must add genuine understanding afterward, then the technology has not fulfilled the task it claims to simplify. Authentic human writing remains irreplaceable because it reflects struggle, perspective, and intellectual ownership. Writers cannot generate these qualities through predictive systems that operate without awareness or purpose in real educational contexts.
Conclusion
Looking forward, AI will likely continue to shape education, but its role must remain clearly defined. When used responsibly, it can support learning without replacing thinking. The responsibility ultimately rests with students to decide whether they want to learn or submit work. Education values the process of questioning, reflecting, and constructing meaning, not just the final product. Overreliance on AI risks weakening intellectual growth by discouraging effort and curiosity. Students must therefore approach AI critically, recognizing it as a tool rather than an authority. The future of education depends on thinkers who engage deeply, not producers who outsource understanding and accept accountability for their ideas, decisions, and academic integrity.
References
Aboodi, R. (2025). The Worrisome Potential of Outsourcing Critical Thinking to Artificial Intelligence. Educational Theory. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.70037
Alghazo, S., Rababah, G., El-Dakhs, D. A. S., & Mustafa, A. (2025). Engagement strategies in human-written and AI-generated academic essays: A corpus-based study. Ampersand, 100237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amper.2025.100237
Baron, N. S. (2023). Who wrote this?: how AI and the lure of efficiency threaten human writing. Stanford University Press. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/dwr/2024-v34-dwr09116/1112555ar.pdf
Bearman, M., Ryan, J., & Ajjawi, R. (2023). Discourses of artificial intelligence in higher education: A critical literature review. Higher Education, 86(2), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00937-2
Dergaa, I., Chamari, K., Zmijewski, P., & Saad, H. B. (2023). From human writing to artificial intelligence-generated text: Examining the prospects and potential threats of ChatGPT in academic writing. Biology of Sport, 40(2), 615–622. https://doi.org/10.5114/biolsport.2023.125623
Eslami, M. (2025). The Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Undergraduate Writing: A Corpus Analysis Study (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine). https://www.proquest.com/openview/e671356da1a570de15aff7126712f524/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
Shabir, A. (2025). Generative AI Writing Tools and Academic Writing in Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Empirical and Review Studies. Information Technology Education Journal, 543–557. https://doi.org/10.59562/intec.v4i3.10494