Disturbed by the increasing prevalence of fake news, a broad coalition of artificial intelligence, technology and media companies has come together to counteract the scourge.

“The ability to create synthetic or manipulated content that is difficult to discern from real events frames the urgent need for developing new capabilities for detecting such content,” observes Terah Lyons, executive director, The Partnership on AI.

The coalition — which also includes a number of nonprofit organizations — will also develop software to authenticate trusted news media, Lyon says.

Ironically, fake news articles and other misinformation is often generated by the same technology – artificial intelligence – that the AI and media communities plan to use against it.

First forged in 2016, The Partnership on AI currently has 90+ commercial and non-profit members, including heavy hitters like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Journalists Have Nothing to Fear With AI, J-School Prof Says: “I am quite confident that AI will not hurt journalism as much as we thought a few years ago,” observes Patrick White, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

“I strongly believe we will always need journalists to analyze the world, put things into context, tell stories, pick and choose top news and make sense of events.”

*Comprehensive Journalism AI Report Due Out in November: An extensive study on artificial intelligence in journalism — featuring insights from 70 news organizations – is set for release November 18.

The survey is being squired by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Funding comes from the Google News Initiative.

Essentially, the report is designed to suggest what AI journalism should – and should not – be.

*UK Clothing Retailer Boosts Email Opens 12% With AI-Generated Writing: Fashion retail goliath N Brown says it has seen a 12% jump in email marketing opens since getting help with email subject heads from AI-generated writing firm Phrasee.

“Phrasee’s language technicians build algorithms that adapt to our brand guidelines, ensuring that our copy is relevant and always on-brand,” says Annand Patel, a customer relationship management exec at N Brown.

“You can’t tell that the language is not written by our copywriting team, because it’s tailored to our tone of voice — which is very important to us.”

Click-through rates on emails sent with Phrasee subject heads also saw a spike – up 21% — according to Angela Rhodes, another CRM exec at the clothing retailer.

A Look at Lately, a Text-to-Social-Media Posting Tool: In this 46-minute podcast, author Steven Hutt offers a deep dive into the AI-driven text summarizer Lately.

The interview features Kate Bradley Chernis, Lately CEO. Chernis details how the solution transforms blogs, press releases, white papers, online articles, newsletters, videos, podcasts and the like into dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social media posts.

*A Survey of AI-Generated Writing: Tech HQ takes a look at how AI writing software is being leveraged in journalism and copywriting.

One of the most prolific users of AI-generated writing profiled is Alibaba. It’s a goliath online business-to-business marketplace that primarily targets the Asian market.

Alibaba uses its AI-generated writing software to auto-create product listings for its online retailers, according to Christina Lu, general manager, Alibaba, the group’s general manager.

The company says the AI software can generate 20,000 lines of copy-per-second.

“AI systems will never be able to replace human creativity,” Lu says. But AI-generated writing solutions “can enable people to focus their major energies towards richly-creative work,” while machines shoulder ‘by-rote’ writing tasks.

*AI-Generated Writing Market Burgeoning to $US 1.1 Billion by 2025: Increasing use of AI-generated writing – also known as natural language processing – is expected to proliferate in marketing, sales and machine learning during the next five years, according to Grand View Research.

Professions most heavily impacted will include journalism, medicine and weather forecasting, according to the report.

Currently, key players in AI-generated writing include IBM, Narrative Science, Arria, Phrasetech, Automated Insights, CoGenTex, Yseop, Artificial Solutions, AX Semantics and Retresco, according to the researchers.

*Entrepreneurial Start-Ups Combating Fake News: At least 13 start-ups have come-up with solutions designed to thwart the spread of fake news online, according to a paper released by Ellen P. Goodman. She’s a senior fellow at the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative.

Most of the start-ups use AI writing software – also known as Natural Language Processing – to fight fake news, she says.

“Nascent and not yet widespread, these businesses are seeking to find new commercial applications for their products and, in some cases, hoping to entice the social media platforms to buy them out,” according to Goodman.

*Pentagon Developing AI Software to Combat Fake News: In yet another reaction to the growing scourge that is fake news, the U.S. Pentagon is developing its own AI-driven software to detect misinformation.

“A decade ago, today’s state-of-the-art would have registered as sci-fi — that’s how fast the improvements have come,” says Andrew Grotto, a national security specialist at Stanford University. “There is no reason to think the pace of innovation will slow any time soon.”

The Pentagon’s goal is to use the AI software it develops to smoke-out fake news and prevent it from going viral.

AI-Generated Writing and the Grand Scheme of Things: Get a look at how AI-generated writing fits into the Grand Scheme of Things with Information Week’s article, “A History of AI: Key Moments in the Story of AI.”

Included in their snapshot on history is Marvin Minsky. He built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine in 1951.

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing. But most of the time, we aren’t either,” Minsky said.

*Writing to Please AI Machines: A Primer: We’ve undoubtedly reached a new milestone in AI-generated writing: A new tutorial on how to write text that passes muster with AI-driven text summarizers.

“There’s a wrong way and a right way to ‘talk’ to a machine,” observes David Seuss, CEO, Northern Light. The company sells an AI solution that condenses long-form text into easily digestible summaries.

“If you want to craft influential content, it’s important to know the distinction.

“That’s because it is now practical for organizations to use machine learning enabled systems to ‘read’ and summarize complex documents, as Northern Light SinglePoint does for market research and competitive intelligence.”

Or, as Sting might croon:

“Devil and the deep blue sea behind me
Vanish in the air you’ll never find me
I will turn your face to alabaster
When you’ll find your servant is your master”

*Also on RobotWritersAI.com — Evergreen Article:

*AI-Created Newsletters: On The Cheap

–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.