In Fortune Magazine, writer David Z. Morris takes a look at artificial intelligence generated writing firms that boost sales by fine-tuning ad slogans and marketing email subject heads.
Already all-in on the technology are firms like Dell, Staples, American Express and JP Morgan Chase.
But some technology watchers are troubled. “I think there are definitely ethical concerns,” says William Wang, director, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, at University of California at Santa Barbara.
“You have to be very careful when you are trying to persuade someone using AI,” he says.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Students Writing With AI Tools: A Done Deal?: Given the ready access to free AI writing tools on the Web, teachers should brace themselves for an age in which students will turn in writing assignments partially — or completely — generated by AI machines, according to a New Zealand professor.
“We could try to ban them — but this software is highly accessible,” observes Grant Jun Otsuki, an anthropology lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. “It would be a losing battle.”
Instead, Otsuki suggests educators refocus their talents on training students how to write with the help of AI-generated writing tools like GPT-2.
“Systems such as GPT-2 could be used as a first-draft machine, taking a student’s raw research notes and turning them into a text they can expand on and revise,” Otsuki observes.
*There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills: AI Fundraising Software Snares $21 Million in New Funding: AI fundraising software Gravyty – geared to nonprofits looking for cash — has won $21 million in new funding.
The software uses AI-generated writing to auto-create first drafts of marketing emails for fundraising.
Gravyty also helps nonprofits pinpoint the optimal time to send fundraising emails.
Plus, its dashboard enables them to monitor, tweak and personalize their fundraising requests.
*AI-Generated Press Releases: An Apparent Inevitability: Writer Mark Henricks finds that the era of machine-generated press releases is fast-approaching.
“I get it that no one has time to tailor every pitch to each individual writer, or each publication,” says John Seabrook, a writer for The New Yorker. “But an AI could do it.
“And if it wasn’t obvious that it was an AI, I’d imagine blind pitches would have a much greater chance of succeeding.”
In this article, Henricks takes a look at where the use of AI-assisted writing is expected to crest first in public relations.
*The Looming Possibility of AI-Generated Novels: While it appears automated writing needs some refinement before it can produce full-length novels, we’ll probably see AI-generated novels sooner or later.
The challenge, according to writer Richard Lea, is how to deal with such works.
Observes Lea: “If a book is ‘a heart that only beats in the chest of another,’ as Rebecca Solnit suggests, then it seems two parties are required: someone to write and someone to read.
“So when AI writes fiction, there seems to be a missing piece, a void at the heart of the text where meaning should reside.”
*AI and Blogging: A Natural Match: AI offers most of today’s blogs a competitive edge, according to Anand Srivastavaf, an Internet marketing consultant.
Specifically, AI tools already on the market can help brainstorm ideas for your blog, polish your writing and automatically generate posts.
Moreover, current tools are only the beginning. Bloggers should expect even more powerful AI automation tools in years to come, according to Srivastavaf.
*AI Tools That Auto-Optimize Writing for the Search Engines: Writers now have a number of AI tools they can use to ensure their work gets ranked as high as possible on the search engines.
Some are stand-alone tools that function solely on making copy SEO-friendly.
Others appear as powerful features embedded in AI writing assistants — which also help you with your spelling, grammar, writing tone and more.
In this article, Edgy Universe offers what it considers the top seven AI SEO optimizers for writers.
*Idiot Savant: AI-Generated Writing Computers Still Struggle to Understand Language: While businesses in virtually every major industry are successfully using AI-generated writing, computers are still having problems understanding what writing means.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence in a new paper.
“This is a fundamental challenge in the grand pursuit of generalizable AI,” observes Karen Hao, a writer with MIT Technology Review.
“But beyond academia, it’s relevant for consumers, too,” Hao adds.
“Without a genuine understanding of language, these systems are more prone to fail, slowing access to important services.”
Even so, at least one AI system – BERT, a machine reading tool created by Google — can now score higher on reading comprehension tests than mere mortals, according to Wired Magazine.
Tal Linzen, a computational linguist at Johns Hopkins University, is investigating the paradox – the ability to score high on a reading comprehension test without having any understanding of the language that is being ‘read.’
Linzen wonders if BERT has found a way to pick-up on “weird tricks that happen to work on the data sets that we commonly evaluate our models on.”
*Washington Post Leverages AI for 2020 Election: It only makes sense that a paper owned by Jeff Bezos – founder of the tech-driven Amazon – plans to rely heavily on artificial intelligence to auto-generate stories about the 2020 election.
The Washington Post has confirmed as much in a blog post.
It adds that its turbo-charged coverage is made possible by Post journalists and computer engineers working closely together to fuse top-tier political reporting with top-tier computer automation.
The upshot: With AI, the paper will be able to more quickly publish stories about presidential election primary results this year.
Ditto for stories about the Big Kahuna on November 3.
*The Robots Are Coming: Prepare for Trouble: Given that AI and automation are poised to disrupt the workforce, the time to begin accommodating that inevitable mayhem is now, according to David Deming.
He’s director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
“We need to accept that we cannot stop the coming wave of technological change,” Deming observes.
“But we can moderate its impact on society,” he adds. “We should act with purpose, embracing AI as a tool that will enable us to create a better and fairer world.”
Special Feature: AI-Created Newsletters on the Cheap
*Found on the Web: PETA Posits: Let’s Make Punxsutawney Phil a Robot: PETA president Ingrid Newkirk says its high time that the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club abandon its thoughtless use of a groundhog to predict spring’s arrival.
Instead, she suggests replacing Punxsutawney Phil with an AI-driven knock-off.
“By creating an AI Phil, you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day — but in a much more progressive way,” Newkirk observes.
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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.