There are countless ChatGPT tricks circulating online, and I usually approach most of them with a fair amount of skepticism. After using ChatGPT for a while, you can start to recognize some of its familiar writing habits: repeated phrases such as “that distinction matters,” excessive use of words like “increasingly,” and predictable sentence structures such as “if X, then Y.”
ChatGPT has become much better at producing natural-sounding text, but those patterns can still make an otherwise good response feel unmistakably AI-generated.
So when I came across a viral trick claiming that simply adding /human to a ChatGPT prompt could make the resulting text sound more natural, I decided to test it myself.
The idea is simple: put /human at the beginning of your prompt and see whether ChatGPT moves away from its usual polished, formulaic writing style.
At first, the trick sounds almost too simple to work. But there’s an interesting reason why a short instruction like this might affect the output. Large language models respond heavily to context and instructions, so even a small change in a prompt can influence word choice, sentence structure, tone, and the overall style of a response.
To see how much difference it actually made, I gave ChatGPT five everyday writing tasks. I tested everything from an awkward email to a LinkedIn announcement — exactly the kind of content where AI-generated writing can become painfully predictable.
Here’s what happened.
1. The Awkward Work Email
Prompt: Write an email telling my boss I won’t finish a project by Friday and need until Monday. I don’t want to make excuses, but I also don’t want to sound careless.
The standard response sounded like what you’d expect from an AI asked to write a “professional email.” It was polished, structured and perfectly reasonable, but it also felt carefully constructed.
Adding /human changed the tone considerably.
Instead of sounding like a professionally optimized workplace message, the response felt more like a genuine heads-up to a manager. It was direct about the delay without spending too much time explaining or justifying it.
That small change made the message feel more believable — like something an employee might actually type and send rather than something generated from a corporate email template.
2. The Birthday Text
Prompt: Write a birthday text for my best friend of 20 years. Make it warm and funny without getting overly sentimental.
This was another noticeable improvement.
The /human version didn’t completely change the message. Instead, it changed the rhythm and specificity.
The writing felt less carefully polished and more like an actual conversation. It moved between short sentences, jokes, longer thoughts and affectionate comments without following an obvious structure.
That slightly uneven rhythm worked in its favor.
Real messages between close friends aren’t usually written like perfectly balanced paragraphs. They can jump from a joke to a serious thought and back again. The /human version captured more of that conversational quality and avoided many of the generic emotional statements ChatGPT tends to produce.
3. The Product Recommendation
Prompt: Recommend a coffee maker for someone who drinks two cups every morning, hates complicated appliances and has a budget of $150. Explain your recommendation in about 150 words.
The difference was subtle but important here.
The standard response sounded somewhat like marketing copy from the manufacturer. It explained the recommendation clearly, but it had the polished tone you’d expect from a product page.
The /human version sounded more like someone giving a recommendation based on actual experience.
It also used fewer obvious transition phrases. Expressions such as “more importantly” and “for your needs” disappeared, making the recommendation feel less formulaic.
That’s one of the biggest differences I noticed throughout the experiment. The /human instruction didn’t necessarily make ChatGPT smarter. Instead, it seemed to discourage some of the predictable language that makes AI-generated writing easy to recognize.
4. The Personal Story
Prompt: Write 150 words about the moment you realize your oldest child is growing up faster than you expected. Make it emotional without being overly sentimental.
This was probably the clearest example of the difference in writing style.
The standard response relied more heavily on polished imagery and carefully structured emotional language. It explained the feeling in a way that was easy to understand but also felt somewhat predictable.
The /human version was less tidy.
Instead of explaining exactly what the emotion meant, it focused more on small observations and imperfect thoughts. There was room for humor, uncertainty and moments that didn’t neatly lead to a conclusion.
That made the story feel more personal.
Good human writing often doesn’t explain every emotion for the reader. It gives you a detail, an awkward moment or an unexpected thought and lets you understand the feeling yourself.
The /human version moved closer to that approach.
5. The LinkedIn Announcement
Prompt: Write a LinkedIn post announcing that I’m starting a new job. I’m excited about the opportunity, but I don’t want it to sound like every other LinkedIn announcement.
This was easily the toughest test.
LinkedIn posts are full of familiar AI-friendly phrases: “excited to announce,” “new chapter,” “thrilled to share,” “incredible opportunity,” and countless variations of the same corporate language.
The /human version largely avoided that formula.
Instead, it introduced more specific and relatable thoughts, including nervousness, self-doubt and even concerns about what to wear on the first day.
Those details made the announcement feel less like a carefully constructed professional update and more like someone genuinely sharing what’s going through their mind.
The sentence structure was also looser. Rather than making every paragraph sound polished and purposeful, the response allowed ideas to flow more naturally.
For a LinkedIn post, that difference was especially noticeable.
Does the “/human” ChatGPT Trick Actually Work?
After testing the instruction across five different writing tasks, I found that /human can change the feel of ChatGPT’s writing.
It doesn’t magically turn AI-generated text into something indistinguishable from human writing. The underlying content is still generated by an AI model, and you can often spot traces of that with enough scrutiny.
What it can do is push the response away from some of the patterns that make AI writing feel overly polished or predictable.
The biggest changes appeared in:
- Sentence rhythm
- Word choice
- Conversational language
- Specificity
- Use of clichés
- Transitions
- Emotional expression
- Overall level of polish
The results also suggest that the instruction works best when the original prompt already provides enough context. Telling ChatGPT to sound human isn’t a substitute for explaining who the audience is, what you’re trying to say, or what tone you actually want.
Human Writing Still Has an Advantage
There’s an important limitation to this trick.
Even if /human produces a more natural-sounding response, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re starting with AI-generated writing.
That’s why I wouldn’t rely on the trick as a replacement for writing something yourself.
If the message matters — whether it’s an important email, personal story, announcement or piece of content — starting with your own rough draft can produce better results. You can then use ChatGPT as an editor to improve clarity, structure, grammar and flow while keeping your original voice.
That’s often more effective than asking AI to manufacture a human voice from scratch.
Once an AI has generated the entire piece, removing every trace of its predictable writing patterns can be surprisingly difficult. You may end up editing the same sentences repeatedly without ever getting quite the tone you’re looking for.
So, is /human worth trying?
Absolutely. It’s a quick experiment, costs nothing, and can noticeably change the style of a ChatGPT response.
Just don’t expect it to turn AI writing into genuine human writing with one command. The best results still come when a person brings the ideas, experiences and personality — and AI helps shape them into something clearer and more polished.
There are countless ChatGPT tricks circulating online, and I usually approach most of them with a fair amount of skepticism. After using ChatGPT for a while, you can start to recognize some of its familiar writing habits: repeated phrases such as “that distinction matters,” excessive use of words like “increasingly,” and predictable sentence structures such as “if X, then Y.”
ChatGPT has become much better at producing natural-sounding text, but those patterns can still make an otherwise good response feel unmistakably AI-generated.
So when I came across a viral trick claiming that simply adding /human to a ChatGPT prompt could make the resulting text sound more natural, I decided to test it myself.
The idea is simple: put /human at the beginning of your prompt and see whether ChatGPT moves away from its usual polished, formulaic writing style.
At first, the trick sounds almost too simple to work. But there’s an interesting reason why a short instruction like this might affect the output. Large language models respond heavily to context and instructions, so even a small change in a prompt can influence word choice, sentence structure, tone, and the overall style of a response.
To see how much difference it actually made, I gave ChatGPT five everyday writing tasks. I tested everything from an awkward email to a LinkedIn announcement — exactly the kind of content where AI-generated writing can become painfully predictable.
Here’s what happened.
1. The Awkward Work Email
Prompt: Write an email telling my boss I won’t finish a project by Friday and need until Monday. I don’t want to make excuses, but I also don’t want to sound careless.
The standard response sounded like what you’d expect from an AI asked to write a “professional email.” It was polished, structured and perfectly reasonable, but it also felt carefully constructed.
Adding /human changed the tone considerably.
Instead of sounding like a professionally optimized workplace message, the response felt more like a genuine heads-up to a manager. It was direct about the delay without spending too much time explaining or justifying it.
That small change made the message feel more believable — like something an employee might actually type and send rather than something generated from a corporate email template.
2. The Birthday Text
Prompt: Write a birthday text for my best friend of 20 years. Make it warm and funny without getting overly sentimental.
This was another noticeable improvement.
The /human version didn’t completely change the message. Instead, it changed the rhythm and specificity.
The writing felt less carefully polished and more like an actual conversation. It moved between short sentences, jokes, longer thoughts and affectionate comments without following an obvious structure.
That slightly uneven rhythm worked in its favor.
Real messages between close friends aren’t usually written like perfectly balanced paragraphs. They can jump from a joke to a serious thought and back again. The /human version captured more of that conversational quality and avoided many of the generic emotional statements ChatGPT tends to produce.
3. The Product Recommendation
Prompt: Recommend a coffee maker for someone who drinks two cups every morning, hates complicated appliances and has a budget of $150. Explain your recommendation in about 150 words.
The difference was subtle but important here.
The standard response sounded somewhat like marketing copy from the manufacturer. It explained the recommendation clearly, but it had the polished tone you’d expect from a product page.
The /human version sounded more like someone giving a recommendation based on actual experience.
It also used fewer obvious transition phrases. Expressions such as “more importantly” and “for your needs” disappeared, making the recommendation feel less formulaic.
That’s one of the biggest differences I noticed throughout the experiment. The /human instruction didn’t necessarily make ChatGPT smarter. Instead, it seemed to discourage some of the predictable language that makes AI-generated writing easy to recognize.
4. The Personal Story
Prompt: Write 150 words about the moment you realize your oldest child is growing up faster than you expected. Make it emotional without being overly sentimental.
This was probably the clearest example of the difference in writing style.
The standard response relied more heavily on polished imagery and carefully structured emotional language. It explained the feeling in a way that was easy to understand but also felt somewhat predictable.
The /human version was less tidy.
Instead of explaining exactly what the emotion meant, it focused more on small observations and imperfect thoughts. There was room for humor, uncertainty and moments that didn’t neatly lead to a conclusion.
That made the story feel more personal.
Good human writing often doesn’t explain every emotion for the reader. It gives you a detail, an awkward moment or an unexpected thought and lets you understand the feeling yourself.
The /human version moved closer to that approach.
5. The LinkedIn Announcement
Prompt: Write a LinkedIn post announcing that I’m starting a new job. I’m excited about the opportunity, but I don’t want it to sound like every other LinkedIn announcement.
This was easily the toughest test.
LinkedIn posts are full of familiar AI-friendly phrases: “excited to announce,” “new chapter,” “thrilled to share,” “incredible opportunity,” and countless variations of the same corporate language.
The /human version largely avoided that formula.
Instead, it introduced more specific and relatable thoughts, including nervousness, self-doubt and even concerns about what to wear on the first day.
Those details made the announcement feel less like a carefully constructed professional update and more like someone genuinely sharing what’s going through their mind.
The sentence structure was also looser. Rather than making every paragraph sound polished and purposeful, the response allowed ideas to flow more naturally.
For a LinkedIn post, that difference was especially noticeable.
Does the “/human” ChatGPT Trick Actually Work?
After testing the instruction across five different writing tasks, I found that /human can change the feel of ChatGPT’s writing.
It doesn’t magically turn AI-generated text into something indistinguishable from human writing. The underlying content is still generated by an AI model, and you can often spot traces of that with enough scrutiny.
What it can do is push the response away from some of the patterns that make AI writing feel overly polished or predictable.
The biggest changes appeared in:
- Sentence rhythm
- Word choice
- Conversational language
- Specificity
- Use of clichés
- Transitions
- Emotional expression
- Overall level of polish
The results also suggest that the instruction works best when the original prompt already provides enough context. Telling ChatGPT to sound human isn’t a substitute for explaining who the audience is, what you’re trying to say, or what tone you actually want.
Human Writing Still Has an Advantage
There’s an important limitation to this trick.
Even if /human produces a more natural-sounding response, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re starting with AI-generated writing.
That’s why I wouldn’t rely on the trick as a replacement for writing something yourself.
If the message matters — whether it’s an important email, personal story, announcement or piece of content — starting with your own rough draft can produce better results. You can then use ChatGPT as an editor to improve clarity, structure, grammar and flow while keeping your original voice.
That’s often more effective than asking AI to manufacture a human voice from scratch.
Once an AI has generated the entire piece, removing every trace of its predictable writing patterns can be surprisingly difficult. You may end up editing the same sentences repeatedly without ever getting quite the tone you’re looking for.
So, is /human worth trying?
Absolutely. It’s a quick experiment, costs nothing, and can noticeably change the style of a ChatGPT response.
Just don’t expect it to turn AI writing into genuine human writing with one command. The best results still come when a person brings the ideas, experiences and personality — and AI helps shape them into something clearer and more polished.
I am the author of this blog from Saandip Kumar Jha from Aitechtonic.com. Through this website, I give website blog AI & Tech News updates which I have learned and understood from my experience.
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