AI-generated writing toolmaker AX Semantics says it doubled visits to its Web site by adding an automated news stream driven by artificial intelligence.

Essentially, three of every four articles on the Web site are now produced by the artificial intelligence writer — providing much more content, much more copy for search engines to notice and ultimately, many more unique visits to the Web site each day, according to Lisa Weidmann, online marketing manager, AX Semantics.

The AI-driven news stream solution works by:

*Continually searching the Web for news with predefined topics

*Summarizing the pertinent news stories it finds

*Auto-adding teaser text to the stories, using AX Semantic’s AI-generated writing software

*Auto-posting the teaser text — along with a link to the original news story — to two company blogs

The same system can also be used to create an AI-driven newstream to social media accounts, according to Weidmann.

Check-out additional detail on AX Semantic’s AI-generated writing tool in this 9-minute video from Inside Tomorrow, featuring Steven Morell, chief revenue officer, AX Semantics.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Well-Known AI-Editing App Gets an Update: Grammarly now color-codes your copy to highlight ways it can be improved. Red signals problems with basic spelling and grammar. Blue points-up a potential lack of brevity or clarity.

Green offers suggestions to make your writing more engaging. And purple offers suggestions to render writing with the right balance of politeness, formality and friendliness.

Grammarly can also be configured to make suggestions/corrections based on the tone you’re looking to set for a document.

Copy going for a formal tone, for example, will receive different suggestions than text designed for a more edgy or irreverent feel.

*Washington Post Gears-Up for Coverage of 2020 Election Powered by Automated Writing: The Jeff Bezos-owned paper has launched a computational political journalism lab to discover ways to automate election coverage with a number of AI tools – including a tool embued with an artificial intelligence writer.

“We’re incredibly excited to kick off the R&D lab and create novel tools to benefit our readers and our reporters,” says Jeremy Bowers, lead for the new lab.

Playing a key role in the effort is Nick Diakopoulos, assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, Northwestern University. Diakopoulos is an expert in AI-generated writing, as well as other forms of automated writing.

*AI in Science Journalism: Promising and Perilous: “AI, despite the name, is not intelligent at all,” observes author Sofia Moutinho. “The outcomes from these kinds of systems depend on the data used, the size of the sample and on how the model is trained. There is a lot of room for bias.”

*The Middle East Gears-up for AI-Generated Writing: Media businesses across the Middle East see AI tools — including those featuring an artificial intelligence writer — as a way to surface news more quickly from public and other databases.

“The media industry, especially in the Middle East, will immensely benefit from robo-journalism because it will make news production more efficient,” says Ali Rafeeq, a journalism professor at United Arab Emirates University.”

Observes article author Caline: “Machines are able to complete within a few seconds what editors and reporters write after hours — if not days — of going through complex reports. And that’s only a start.”

Adds Damian Radcliffe, a journalism Professor at University of Oregon: “Most robo-journalism, at the moment, tends to follow quite formulaic reporting formats, including earnings (and sports) reports. But that will change and evolve over time as machines get smarter.

“At a time when we have access to more data than ever, anything that can help to improve and streamline what journalists do, is welcome,” he adds.

*Leveraging Data Journalism as a Tool for Company Promotion: Businesses regularly generating social media posts, blogs, articles, infographics and other media for their content marketing campaigns can turn to data journalism tools for help, according to Jia Yoong, a content strategist at Yoghurt.

Essentially, these AI-generated writing tools – which mine databases to auto-produce news stories and infographics — are already used by a number of major news outlets, including RADAR. Currently, U.K.-based RADAR is auto-generating 8,000 – 10,000 news stories a month using AI-generated writing.

“If you already have an idea of what your story might be, this can help you narrow your data mining down faster,” Yoong observes. “You can use existing company insights — or scout the web for the latest trends. Some good places to look are Amazon Public Data Sets and Google Trends.”

*An Expert Look Into the State of Data Journalism: In this podcast, Sandeep Junnarkar, director of interactive journalism, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, offers an in-depth examination of how AI data journalism tools are transforming the news business at The New York Times and other media giants.

*Four Ways Marketing Copywriters Can Use Data Journalism Tools: Matt Gillespie, head of data science, Fractl – a marketing firm – offers a nuanced look at how PR and other agencies can use data visualization tools to add vibrancy to their creative.

“Content marketers, who are absolutely inundated with advice on how storytelling is essential to their work, need to see data journalism as a way to drive their narratives forward — rather than thinking of data visualization simply as a way to pique interest or enhance credibility,” Gillespie observes.

*AI-Generated Writing: A Snapshot: Econtent offers a primer on the current state of AI-generated writing. “From a technological standpoint, is it possible to turn on the machines and let them generate content at 100%? Absolutely,” says John Hathorn, director of marketing, Automated Insights, an AI-generated writing toolmaker. “Do you want them to do that in their current state across the broad market? Absolutely not.”

Instead, you want “a balance between augmenting your human workforce to allow them to focus on higher-value tasks while letting the machine automate what can be data-driven,” Hathorn says.

*Call for Long-Form Reads on Data Journalism: DataJournalism.com is looking for detailed perspectives on how journalists and others are using data journalism tools.

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.