*Despite fears harbored by some company copywriters, eBay decided to bring in artificial intelligence to auto-generate email subject lines for its promotional emails. The tool – from Phrasee – frees-up writers from the drudgery of making seemingly endless tweaks on email subject lines.

The result: eBay’s copywriters are now able to devote more time to more creative work, such as crafting prose, according to Molly Prosser, associate creative director at eBay and a big believer in AI writing tools.

“All the time I’ve spent lingering over the length of a subject line, wondering ‘Is this word more engaging, or is this word more engaging’, or ‘How do I convey urgency without seeming too cliché’,” says Prosser. “The hours I’ve spent editing and having team members pour over these things — it’s just meaningless work when we have a piece of AI that can do that for us. ” 

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Prominent Newsletter Service Provider Adds AI-Powered Writing / Curation: Naylor Association Solutions has enhanced its newsletter service with AI from Rasa.io. The new capability enables Naylor to offer a personalized newsletter for each association member it services — based on his or her interests and reading habits.

The AI tool incorporates personalized content that Naylor generates in-house, as well as content it finds on the Web –including job ads that match the specific job skills of the reader.

Essentially, AI enables newsletters to become ever-more personalized over time by monitoring how each reader interacts with his or her personalized newsletter, and making adjustments accordingly, says Amith Nagaranjan, executive chairman, Rasa.io.

*Heavy Hitter PR Agency Makes Major Commitment to AI: APCO Worldwide now has an AI lab designed to test and leverage the latest in AI tech – including AI-generated writing – for its clients. “The lab is powered by communications and technology experts who are tapping into a demand for disruptive AI technologies,” says Imad Lahad, a senior director at APCO. “Currently, it is focusing on using AI to revolutionize the way we think about content optimization, storytelling, digital and social media optimization, multimedia and creative, crisis management, media monitoring and digital listening.”

*Report: Key Toolmakers in Automated Writing: Five firms — Arria, Automated Insights, AX Semantics, Narrative Science and Yseop — are the most established vendors in the natural language processing sector this year, according to a June 2019 report from Gartner, a well-known market research firm.

The companies offer tools that enable news organizations and companies to auto-generate writing from raw data. Besides picking the Top Five, the report also offers a great overview of the auto-generated writing industry sector. Grab your own copy of the Gartner report free (it’s ordinarily $1,295) from a link on Yseop’s Web site.

*AI-Powered Journalism: Fundamentally Changing the Role of the Journalist: Researchers putting together The Journalism AI Global Survey, say early feedback indicates AI-generated writing and similar tools are completely redefining the journalist’s job.

“What we take away from it is the awareness that something fundamental is changing, because of the unprecedented possibilities offered by AI-powered technologies,” the researchers observe. “Something so big that it requires new skills and training, learning how to get data scientists and investigative journalists on the same page, speaking the same language, and even rethinking the whole notion of ‘journalism,’ what its ‘core business’ has become, and ultimately what ethics and transparency — a crucial notion to each and every respondent — mean when machines augment human journalists.”

*Leveraging Data-Generated Stories for Company Promotion: New AI tools that auto-transform data into engaging stories are a great way for businesses to auto-generate valuable content for their newsletters, Web sites, social media posts and other promotional digital properties, according to Amanda Milligan, marketing director, Fractl – a public relations agency.

Essentially, the same tools that news media outlets like The New York Times, the LA Times and the Associated Press use to generate news from data can also be used by companies to create their own content, according to Milligan.

*AI-Generated Writing Tool Auto-Creates Posts on Social Media: Businesses looking to auto-search shareable writing and other Web content – and then auto-repackage it as curated content on social media — may want to take a look a Lately.

The solution works by first connecting to your business’ social media accounts and importing all of the content you posted during the previous year – using that content as a training set for the kind of content your company considers best for promotion.

Subsequently, the tool automatically begins searching the Web for long-form content based on the kind of content you previously posted – bringing back articles, blogs, videos and podcasts.

Lately then repackages the curated content to fit your business’ voice and brand and re-generates that curated content as social media posts. Those posts are also scheduled to publish at the precise moment they are likely to be read or viewed, according to Chernis.

*Three Perspectives: How AI Is Transforming Newsrooms: In this 41-minute video, key early adopters of AI-generated writing and similar AI tools offer insights into how AI has changed the way their newsrooms operate.

The featured panelists:

*Monique White, head of AI and information extracation, Bloomberg News

*Robin Govik, chief digital officer, Mittmedia

*Peter, Buhr, technical advisor, Axel-Springer

*AI in Public Relations: A Snapshot: PR News author Nicole Schuman takes the measure of AI’s increasingly influential foothold in public relations — including a look at AI-generated writing.

“Whether or not Alexa or Siri are your best girlfriends, PR practitioners should understand the extent to which their organizations use AI and its performance,” Schuman observes.

*How AI-Generated Writing Empowers Writers: AI writing toolmaker Arria makes the case that automated writing tech offers writers a leg-up – rather than showing them the door. “It’s not a threat, but a pedestal,” Arria shares on its blog. AI-generated writing “stands to make writers and writing more important to businesses.”

Moreover, by 2022, 25% of firms will be using some form of automated writing, according to Gartner, a market research firm. That’s good news for AI-empowered writers, according to Arria, given that once writers have mastered an AI-generated writing tool, they’ll be in high demand across most industries.

–Joe Dysart is 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.