I Used AI To Write My Birthday Invites (No One Came)
We’re all stupid.
We don’t like jargon, we don’t understand complex words, and we hate long sentences.
And yet, we copy-paste AI-generated text and consider it “good”!
But who am I to judge? I made the same mistake a few weeks ago.
The Sad Story of My 30th Birthday
It all started a few weeks ago. My 30 birthday was approaching, and I was creating a Facebook event in my underwear while sipping my morning coffee.
I was too lazy to write it, so I used ChatGPT to do the work.
Sending out AI generated invites
I'm hitting “Enter”, copy, paste, and invites are sent. All that’s left is to wait for my friends & family as they’re coming with all the gifts.
But none of that happened.
On the day of my birthday, I was sitting on my couch, all alone.
No cake, no presents, no birthday singing. Just me staring into a maze of loneliness (with close family members).
And that got me thinking. What went wrong?
The Sad Truth About AI-Generated Text
We’ve heard a bunch of things about AI text.
- It’s soulless.
- It doesn’t have any sense of humor.
- It’s boring.
And I agree with all of that. But there’s another thing that trumps them all. The thing that made everyone ignore my birthday invitation.
It’s fricking hard to read!
I pulled out my birthday invitation and I tried to read it. I read it again, then again, and again.
And that’s when it hit me. No one could read this crap.
- It’s got long sentences.
- It has words that even I don’t understand.
- It loses the thought before the sentence ends.
But don’t just take my word for it. Look at the result from the text analysis tool.
Analyzing AI text
As you might guess, red means bad. And to me, the text above looks like a 10-year-old girl with her first period sat on it.
But enough of my analysis. The damage is already done. My birthday party is long gone. And I have 10 years left for my next big birthday.
So what’s left for me? I can try to make AI sound more human.
The Simple Trick To Make AI Sound Human
Can AI-generated text sound human? Can we enjoy reading it?
These were my thoughts after the failure I described a few minutes ago.
I couldn’t help but wonder. So I did the most simple thing I could think of. I tried…
I asked ChatGPT to make the text sound more human — didn’t work. I asked ChatGPT to use simple language and short sentences — didn’t work. I begged…
Me begging for better results
It didn’t work.
But then I found the solution. The antidote to poorly written, AI-generated text.
I told ChatGPT to write at a 5th-grade English comprehension level. And that’s what did the trick.
Finally getting a “good” result
I even tried to combine all these techniques together, and that’s when I got the best results.
So the trick to sound AI more “human”? Tell it to write like a 5th grader.
Last Words
Do you want people to show up at your party? Write the invite yourself.
Do you want your friends to like you? Use your own words to talk to them.
AI is a good way to get boring tasks done. But it’s not a tool to replace your sense of humor, your wit, and it’s certainly not a tool to replace your personality.