How to edit AI copy so it stops sounding generic
Learn to spot the structural tells in an AI draft and rework it into copy a competitor could not publish under their own name.
Why the draft reads smooth and says nothing
The draft arrives clean. Grammar is correct and the paragraphs are the right length and every section has a tidy closing line. Then somebody reads it aloud in a review meeting and the room goes quiet because the thing could belong to any company in the category. Swap the brand name and nothing breaks.
That hollowness is not a style problem. An AI draft is assembled from the average of everything written on the subject so it contains the claims everyone makes and none of the detail only you hold. The sentences that would be hard for a rival to copy are precisely the sentences missing from it.
What editing will not fix and what it actually costs
Editing cannot fix an empty draft. If the piece contains no information from inside your business then no amount of rewording will make it specific. At that point you are writing rather than editing and the honest budget is the writing budget. Editing also will not verify anything. An AI draft may carry a confident number or a study reference that does not exist and only a human who knows the subject will catch it.
Plan for the edit to take roughly as long as drafting from a blank page would have taken on a short piece. The saving shows up on longer formats where structure is the slow part. You also have to supply the raw material yourself. Process detail and pricing logic and the actual objections buyers raise are not available to any tool.
Who can leave the draft as it is
Some copy is meant to be generic. A product specification sheet or a dispatch notification or a statutory disclosure should read like every other one because the reader is scanning for a field rather than forming an impression. Rewriting those for personality wastes a morning and risks dropping a detail that mattered.
There is also a harder case. If nobody in the business can say what the brand sounds like then editing will not help. The draft gets swapped for a different average and two reviewers will argue about adjectives for a week. Settle the voice question first with a short written reference that names what the business does and does not say. A business competing purely on lowest price can also skip this work. Its buyers are comparing rate cards and the prose will not change that.
The actual edit sequence
Cut the scaffolding first. Opening sentences that set the scene and closing sentences that summarise what was just said can usually be deleted whole. Most AI drafts also repeat a three-part rhythm in every paragraph. Breaking that pattern does more for readability than any word substitution.
Then replace every abstraction with something only your business can supply. A line about fast turnaround becomes the actual sequence of what happens after an order lands. A line about understanding customer needs becomes the question your support team gets asked twice a week. Where a claim carries a number check it against your own records or remove it. Finally read the piece aloud. Sentences that need a breath in the middle usually need a full stop instead.
How to tell whether the edit worked
Detector scores flatter and mislead. A tool that rates text as human written is measuring sentence patterns rather than substance and a bland human draft passes easily. Readability scores have the same weakness.
The test that matters takes one minute. Pick any three sentences and ask whether a direct competitor could publish them under their own name without changing a word. If the answer is yes for all three the edit has not landed. On outbound email the reply rate tells you the same thing more slowly.
The mistake that burns the editing hour
Most teams edit for tone when the problem is substance. They soften the formality and add a conversational aside and approve it. The draft now sounds friendlier and still contains nothing a reader could not have guessed. The hour is spent and the piece is no more persuasive than before.
This is expensive because it converts a cheap draft into an expensive one with no gain. Worse it builds a library of pleasant pages that give buyers no reason to pick you. Volume then becomes the only lever left and that is the most expensive lever in content.
One check before anything goes live
Read the piece once for claims rather than style. Anything that states a figure or a regulation or a third party finding needs a source you can name or it comes out. An invented statistic survives in search results and in screenshots long after you have corrected the page.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.