Use AI without sounding like AI

AI is the best writing intern you have ever had and the most confident liar. It will invent metrics, employers, degrees, and tools with a straight face. Your job is to keep it on a leash of verified facts.

Strong uses

• Extract requirements from a posting into a checklist.
• Brainstorm transferable skills from a messy work history.
• Tighten wording of bullets you already wrote.
• Identify missing evidence compared with a posting.
• Generate likely interview questions for a specific role.
• Critique a spoken answer for vagueness, length, or missing result.
• Research the company from public pages and summarize products, customers, and news.

Weak and dangerous uses

• One-click mass applications.
• Fabricated achievements, fake credentials, fake employers, fake dates.
• Answers you do not understand.
• Hidden real-time assistance during an interview the employer prohibited.
• Uploading confidential employer documents, customer data, or unpublished financials into a consumer chatbot.
• Letting AI invent a ‘personal why’ for a company you have not researched.

How to humanize AI output in 6 passes

1. 01Delete every adjective you would not say at a dinner table.
2. 02Replace ‘leveraged,’ ‘utilized,’ ‘spearheaded,’ ‘synergies,’ and ‘robust’ with normal verbs.
3. 03Put back proper nouns from your real life: the system name, the shift, the store count, the software.
4. 04Shorten. If a bullet is two lines of throat-clearing, cut the first clause.
5. 05Read it aloud. If it sounds like a press release, rewrite.
6. 06Check every number and tool against your evidence bank.