The jobs of journalists, copywriters, public relations pros and other writers saw increasing automation by artificial intelligence in Q1, 2020.
AI-generated writing service provider United Robots, for example, is now offering automated interviews of key figures in sports news to go along with its automated sports reporting.
And Reuters is now auto-generating the scripts it uses to create some of its sports news videos.
Meanwhile, Q1, 2020 saw additional automation crop-up in the generation of press releases, presidential election coverage — and the proliferation of marketing copy across the Web.
Increasing AI automation has been so intense, media futurist Hossein Derakhshan predicted AI-generated writing and similar tools will spell extinction for most newsroom jobs.
No wonder 13,000 students from across the globe swarmed to sign-up for a course in data journalism offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
Even so, AI-generated writing pioneer Nick Diakopoulos continued to assert that on balance, AI will be a job creator for journalism — not a job killer.
Diakopoulos is assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, at Northwestern University.
No matter what your take, one thing is certain: AI’s winds of change continue to rustle through the worlds of all pro writers.
Here are the Top Ten stories of Q1, 2020 powering that change:
Now, AI Is Conducting News Interviews, Too: Reporters looking over their shoulders at the automation of their jobs have a new concern: the advent of the robot-conducted interview.
Specifically, Swedish AI-generated writing firm United Robots says it’s already auto-interviewing sports coaches using an AI-driven computer program.
The instant-interview feature – known as Q & A – enhances the auto-sports reporting software United Robots has been using for years.
That code has been auto-writing stories on sports game results, drawing from up-to-the-minute data provided by the game coaches.
“Almost all Swedish local news groups publish automatically generated post-match reports of all games in all divisions in all sports — using United Robots NLG (natural language generation) based sports robot,” United Robots reports on its blog.
“The new Q & A function adds a human element.
“After writing the match report, the robot sends relevant questions via text message to team coaches.
“The coaches’ quotes are automatically inserted into the articles published on the news publishers’ sites.”
Since 2018, United Robots has conducted automated interviews with 602 coaches using its Q&A feature.
All told, 6,272 quotes on game results have been mined from those interviews and published across approximately 30 Swedish news sites, according to the United Robots blog.
Reuters Creating Sports News Videos With AI: Artificial intelligence generated writing — which has been automating the production of some news stories for about five years now — is moving into sports news video.
Specifically: Reuters has begun using AI-generated writing to auto-generate video scripts for sports news.
The prototype system uses a minute-by-minute data feed from a sporting event to auto-create a text script of the game – complete with matching photography.
After the script is written, it’s processed and read aloud by the system’s AI-generated sports presenter – created from numerous video clips of a human presenter.
“Having pre-filmed a presenter to say the name of every premier league football team, every player, and pretty much every possible action that could happen in a game, Reuters can now generate an indefinite number of synthesized match reports using his image,” according to Forbes writer Simon Chandler. “These reports are barely indistinguishable from the real thing.”
Reuters’ longterm view: “Potentially, you could have presenter-led video reports on every football match in the UK, Europe or the entire world, delivered all-but-instantly after each match ends — or even at any point during play,” Chandler observes. “The possibilities are almost endless.”
*Expect More Press Releases to Be Written By AI: PR agencies will increasingly turn to AI to write press releases in coming years, according to Katie Paine.
She’s CEO of Paine Publishing, which specializes in analyzing the impact of its clients’ marketing and press relations.
“AI and data analysis will be an ever-larger part of the communications toolkit — not just for measurement, but also for responding to crises, managing risk and even writing press releases,” Paine observes.
Paine is one of 20 PR industry experts PR Daily interviewed for prognostications on what the PR industry can expect in 2020.
*Editor: AI Commonplace at News Outlets in Two Years:
Already embraced by a number of top newspapers, the use of AI-generated writing and similar tools could become de rigueur in as little as two years, according to David Tomchak.
He’s digital editor-in-chief at the London Evening Standard – a paper that has already brought AI on board.
Tomchak’s caveat on AI: “We shouldn’t throw away the quality of journalism in a rush to technology. We need to figure out how to use it properly.
“That will come from human beings, not from the technology itself.”
This article featuring Tomchak from the International News Media Association offers a great overview of AI’s application in journalism, along with an insightful Q&A with Tomchak.
*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 first-in-class 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.
*Students Worldwide Swarm Course in Data Journalism: Nearly 13,000 students from across the globe signed-up for a course in data journalism offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
“We were stunned at the enthusiasm for the course,” says Simon Rogers, one of the course instructors and data editor on Google’s News Lab Team.
The six-week stint took students from 160 countries through “the entire pipeline of producing a data story,” Rogers says.
One of the most widely known applications of data journalism is the AI-generation of vivid graphs and other illustrations from info databases.
But data journalism also refers to the AI-generation of articles from databases.
*China: Robot Writers Have Copyright Protection: A Chinese court has ruled that AI-generated writing is protected by copyright.
The winner in the ruling: tech giant Tencent. It sued after an article created by its Dreamwriter robot was republished without permission by a financial info Web site.
The Chinese court decision differs from current legal thinking in the U.S. and Canada. Both countries have so far concluded that robot writers do not enjoy copyright protection, according to Ecns.cn.
In the Chinese lawsuit, the court found that robot writers are entitled to copyright protection, as long as their work exhibits reasonable structure, clear logic and detectable originality, according to Ecns.com.
*Futurist: AI Will Kill Most Newsroom Jobs: Media futurist Hossein Derakhshan predicts that AI-generated writing and similar tools spell extinction for most newsroom jobs.
“AI technologies are now capable of doing almost every aspect of the news practice with a fraction of the costs in the long term,” Derakhshan observes.
“The AI capture of newsrooms will kill more jobs than we can imagine,” Derakhshan adds. “It will also kill many newsrooms who can’t afford to invest in AI technologies to lower their costs in order to survive.”
Derakhshan’s silver lining: Human-driven journalism is reinventing itself in a form that can complement AI-generated writing — one he calls ‘post-news journalism.’
Essentially, it’s the kind of long-form, affective narrative that is the hallmark of journalists like Bob Woodward, Errol Morris and Michael Barbaro, Derakhshan says.
Derakhshan is a London-based media researcher and a former fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
His view differs markedly from fellow academic Nick Diakopoulos. He sees AI journalism as changing the nature of newsroom jobs – but not eliminating them.
“Human work will be hybridized – blended together with algorithms – to suit AI’s capabilities and accommodate its limitations,” Diakopoulos observes.
Diakopoulos is assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, at Northwestern University.
*Future Shock: Prepare for AI to Be The Web’s Number One Author: While AI-generated writing insiders often downplay its potential impact on writers’ jobs, Mayur Bhatt is not among them.
“It is only a matter of time before algorithms are able to write articles on any topic and for any target group,” observes Bhatt, marketing head at SEO Services Guru.
“AI will probably even be able to produce excellent content at an enormous speed in the future.
“This makes it easier to individualize and personalize texts, so that all essential information about a reader flows in and affects the written and adapted text.
“AI gets to know the readers very well and can use all information about the recipient, so that each piece of content is individual.
“Just imagine what content arises when an AI can easily read your complete (public) Facebook profile and use this information for suitable content.”
*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.
*Robot Rock: AI-Powered Robot Launches Music Tour: If you’re craving some original tunes with a decidedly silicon flair, singer / songwriter Shimon the robot is your ticket.
The so-wired personnna – who composes his own lyrics using AI-generated writing — is going on tour to promote his new album.
He even has a choice cut you can listen to on YouTube right now.
The crooner, who is often backed-up by human musicians, was created by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Full disclosure: Georgia Tech’s researchers did help Shimon set his lyrics to music.
Rock on Shimon.
Bleep bloop.
*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves
Share a Link: Please consider sharing a link to https://RobotWritersAI.com from your blog, social media post, publication or emails. More links leading to RobotWritersAI.com helps everyone interested in AI-generated writing.
–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.