What humanizing tech writing looks like
Human. I keep seeing this word everywhere. If you go to Medium’s home page, it’s one of the only words on the page: "Human stories & ideas.” It’s become important to clarify that humans are still part of the story of online content. Human impact. Human enriched. Human in the loop.
Human, as an adjective, is all over LinkedIn, particularly in job descriptions and posts where AI has become the dominant topic of conversation. Examples:
Building human, high-impact customer experiences
Keeping humans in charge of the collaborative AI process
Looking for a human-centric content strategist
Providing AI-powered, human-enriched content
In B2B SaaS spaces, it’s long been a challenge to write copy that’s relatable and meaningful. We may call this type of writing “human” now, mainly to distinguish it from corporate speakery and AI sloppery, but it’s still technical business writing in the end, albeit with a purpose—communicating the complexity of a given technology (along with its value).
By inserting AI into the writing process, we’ve tipped the scales in favor of meaningless jargon. We’ve gone overboard on what is often buzzword-laden drivel. I’m seeing this in all sorts of corporate nooks and crannies, on home pages, landing pages, and plastered across my LinkedIn feed. There’s an absolute glut of abstract, overstuffed, and emotionally sterile copy that doesn’t communicate anything tangible about what a SaaS platform or specific company does.
Here are a few real examples from corporate websites that I’ve com across on my virtual travels:
Empowers organizations to rapidly build and deploy human-centered, AI-powered digital experiences—from apps to websites—that drive customer acquisition, retention and competitive success.
Accelerates revenue growth and operational efficiency with AI-fueled technology and forward deployed engineers using a seamless blend of technology, data and human ingenuity.
The AI platform to create and optimize every digital experience so the experience-makers can do the work they love.
The infinite workforce your great ideas have been waiting for, here to run your workflows, save you costs, and free your sanity.
Where human-centric content strategy meets AI innovation.
Maximize the potential of AI for marketing, brand building, and thought Leadership while keeping the human touch intact.
I selected the above examples because they all make it clear that there’s still human oversight involved in the accelerating, optimizing, maximizing, and otherwise supercharging your [insert the thing you want AI to do here].
And these are all fine for taglines and intro text, I suppose. But they don’t say much and they all sound the same. That makes me wonder if the companies using the vaguely aspirational and homogenous language can live up to their promise of human oversight, particularly when it comes to content. It begs the question, what does humanization look like in an increasingly AI-driven corporate ecosystem? I’ve thought about this a lot from a content perspective and what I’ve come to believe is that human-centric content needs to start from a human perspective. That is, let me write the thing, please!
For my client Coveo, human-centric content often meant interviewing a subject matter expert or watching a webinar given by an expert (or experts) about a complex topic like explaining how AI search is different from traditional search and how elements like generative answering and predictive autocomplete offer searchers much more natural ways to find products and information. They are also changing how people search and this needed to be communicated too. Coveo calls this new way of searching for stuff online an “intent box” versus a “search box.” There’s a danger here of swirling away into obscurity. The word “intent” is used a lot in the context of digital buying journeys.
As the writer of a post introducing the concept of an “intent box” (one of Coveo’s core offerings), I was tasked with clarifying the technology to potential business buyers, while making its value clear. Defining the tech and communicating value (without cramming a sales pitch into the piece) was the assignment, but so was keeping it human. I did that by using tangible examples of something a real (human) shopper might search for. In this case, “comfortable sofa for a small apartment.”
I often used examples from my own life and experience. I’m an avid birder and have searched for a way to squirrel-proof my feeders. This is the perfect example of intent without a specific product in mind. Asking a generative engine to help me find products to deter squirrels is not the same as typing an exact keyword into a search engine (e.g., squirrel-proof feeder). If you ask AI to come up with an example like this, it tends to default to the same examples over and over again (running shoes or blouses, mostly).
Tangible examples (but not the same examples that AI uses over and over again). Real stories (but tied to specific buying personas). Interviews or webinars that feature the SMEs talking about how their technology worked to solve a problem, what makes it different, why and how a company chose to work it—all of this is what humanizes content.
I have never asked Claude or ChatGPT to generate an entire 1500 word article or blog post from a cient-supplied brief because what it would give me is something completely inhuman. I have had chatbots review a paragraph I’ve written and suggest areas for improvement or revisions based on the brief to, say, optimize for a given keyword or ensure I didn’t miss a point. I’ve had it pull specific quotes from interview or webinar transcripts that I can use to support a point in a piece. I’ve had it generate titles, section headers, and bulleted lists which I often refine or completely rewrite.
Is this slower than having ChatGPT spit out the first draft of something in its entirety? Yes? No? I don’t know. I find it much quicker to draft something and work with the LLM to refine my own words and writing than to take a block of generative AI text and try to humanize it. But I am a writer and this is the thing I do. This is why you hire a writer, because it’s the skill they’ve worked to master and hone over years.
I’m not sure how many humans actually read the tech articles and posts that I’ve written for clients like Coveo. I do know that generative engines tend to pick it up and incorporate it into their answers and that Coveo, being a generative AI search engine, understands the value of writing that answers questions in a meaningful way. I learned a lot about the importance of being specific, going deep, and differentiating copy in the three years I worked with them. I think keeping things human means we can’t outsource everything to AI or automation. We need to keep doing some of the hard stuff ourselves.