Banking goliath Chase will be relying on artificial intelligence writing tools from Persado to advertise its credit card and mortgage businesses for at least the next five years.
Key to the bank’s decision to ink the multi-year contract with the AI service provider: Testing during the past three years, which revealed Persado’s AI-generated ads performed better than ads written by humans.
Chase is one of 250 marketers across retail, finance and hospitality that have brought in Persado’s AI-generated writing, according to Alex Vratskides, CEO, Persado.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Dell Drives More Sales With AI-Generated Writing: The computer manufacturing titan says it boosted sales substantially by testing alternate forms of the same ad created with AI-generated writing and then using the best.
To put Persado through its paces, the company used its AI-generated writing software to create 256 versions of the same ad for a new laptop.
The result: When Dell ran the ad deemed best in testing, sales conversions jumped 45%. Plus, revenue jumped 63%, according to Dell.
*New AI Tool Sniffs-Out Fake News: Researchers at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed AI software that can identify fake news – including stories created with AI-generated writing software.
The software smokes-out fake news text – as well as fake online reviews and phony social media accounts – by isolating prose using words that most likely occur in a sequence.
Such predictable writing is a preference of computers, which generally are unable to imitate unpredictable word selections, unexpected rhythm changes and unusual clause choices. Those are all the hallmark of human writers – at least for the time being.
*Get Ready for Writing SEO-Optimized with AI: Expect news organizations to begin using artificial intelligence writing tools to optimize their rankings in the search engines, according to author Frank Landman.
He predicts some news organizations will most likely begin using AI soon to generate virtually endless streams of new text content across the Web.
The digital smoke-and-mirrors could be used to trick search engines into seeing some news Web sites as more influential than they really are.
In a worst-case scenario, AI could be used to continually generate content on hundreds if not thousands of Web sites – all of which would continually provide increasing numbers of search engine links back to a particular news site.
Sites that are linked to from hundreds or thousands of other Web sites are generally seen as influential by the search engines, and they generally reward such sites by listing them higher up in search engine returns.
*The Future: News Stories Personalized Using AI-Mined Databases: News publishers should be striving to produce stories featuring highly localized and personalized data from AI-mined databases, according to David Gosen, chief commercial officer, Csense.
“If you increase the personalized content, you drive higher page views, greater dwell time and higher impressions, which enables the publisher to generate higher advertising revenues,” Gosen says.
News generated from AI-mined databases – and written by AI-generated writing – has been perfected by news agencies like RADAR.
The UK-based service currently auto-generates 8,000 – 10,000 news stories a month, offering hyper-localized news stories extracted from government and other databases.
*Data Journalism On-the-Cheap: Author KuangKeng Kuek Ser says even smaller publications can bring data journalism in-house, despite limited budgets. All they need is the proper training, he says.
*AI-Driven Chatbots: Another AI Tool Automating Another Writer’s Job: Company text-chat messaging — traditionally handled by human writers engaging in customer service, tech support and sales — appears ready to be automated by artificial intelligence writing tools.
Specifically, researchers at IBM India are working to develop AI-driven chatbots that are more empathetic and can better grasp the nuances of language.
That seems a daunting task, given the widespread population of severely limited chatbots currently strewn across the Web, whose favorite responses after three-or-four exchanges seem to be, “I don’t understand,” “Can you rephrase your question?” or “Not applicable.”
IBM India’s solution to the maladay has been to recruit Watson — one of the company’s most powerful AI tools — to power its future smart chatbot.
AI-driven Watson gained worldwide recognition a few years back when it relied on AI to beat the best players on the TV show Jeapardy!
*With Chatbots, AI Makes All the Difference: VentureBeat offers a sponsored, in-depth look into the state of AI-generated writing driven chatbots.
“The technology has now matured to the point where not only can companies engage in the way their customers want to engage – whether it’s through messaging, through an app, or through voice – they can do it cost-effectively,” VentureBeat observes.
*Looming Threat: A Skewed 2020 Election, Courtesy AI-Generated Fake News: “The potential now exists for thousands of unique, auto-generated articles to be placed by bots — and flood media channels — all in an instant,” observes Gary Grossman, technology practice lead, Edelman AI Center of Expertise.
“Even more scary is a coordinated attack, where both text-based and deep-fake videos are unleashed simultaneously, with the video seemingly prompting the thousands of text-based responses that serve to reinforce and legitimize the fake news,” Grossman adds.
“This could easily be a 2020 election scenario,” Grossman says.
*AI-Powered Translation Threatens Industry Jobs: Pink slips may start flying like locusts at traditional language translation agencies, thanks to the increasing use of AI-powered translation systems, according to Ofer Shoshan, CEO, One Hour Translation.
“By 2022, most business translations will be carried out by neural machine technology engines — which will be largely near free-of-charge — with human post-editing,” Shoshan says.
“We are now witnessing an acceleration of this trend,” Shoshan adds. “Many of the existing agencies and translators will be forced to shut down — or focus on post-editing, reviewing or the highly specialized end of the business.”
Bottom line: Shoshan believes hundreds of thousands jobs in the global translation industry are on the line as use of neural machine translation technology burgeons.
AI-Generated Writing Gets a Voice: Increasing numbers of publishers are turning to Amazon Polly
— a text-to-voice service driven in part by AI – to narrate news stories in a convincing, newscaster-style voice.
Latest to add Amazon Polly is The Globe and Mail. “Readers will be able to listen to most of our content being read aloud in a realistic newscaster voice,” says Greg Doufax, chief technology / digital officer, The Globe and Mail. “It’s a first for Canada.”
Given the realistic sound of AI-driven text-to-voice systems like Amazon Polly, it appears inevitable that many news media outlets will use artificial intelligence to offer news in both text and voice narration formats.
–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.