Biding Its Time: AI Soon Overlord of All Media?

In this wide-ranging article, RedShark makes the case for a world in which all media is dominated, guided and produced by AI.

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New breakthroughs in AI-generated writing alone do lend credence to the proposition.

“Sunspring,” a short film screened at a recent Sundance film festival, for example, used a script generated by a computer.

Saatchi & Saatchi presented a pop promo at a recent Cannes Lions festival scripted – and directed – by AI.

And Canadian data-analysis company Greenlight Essentials launched a campaign on Kickstarter to fund what it describes as the first feature film co-written by AI.

“AI used to be relegated to only the fastest supercomputers,” says Paul Turner, vice president, Enterprise Product Management, Telestream. “But recent advances in software and the use of GPUs to process the algorithms mean that the cost of AI assistance is no longer a barrier to entry.”

In other AI-generated writing news:

*French Firm Publishes 150,000+ AI-Generated Articles: AI solutions provider Demain.ai has published more than 150,000 articles using AI-generated writing during the past 12 months, according to Olivier Mégean, the company’s president.

Demain.ai uses AI writing software from Arria NLG to auto-produce news stories.

“Today’s reality is that media must produce massive volumes of high-quality coverage with no additional staff — and lower budgets than they once had,” Mégean says.

*Google Funds AI-Generated Writing at Arab Publisher: Al Bawaba Group’s “Disco Content Marketplace” has snared a grant from the Google News Initiative Challenge Fund to help support auto-writing of its content.

“Disco offers its users access to 6,500+ licensed content products and sources, along with multiple buying and licensing models to suit users’ needs, plus seamless API integrations,” says Mark Gatty Saunt, director, content sales & licensing, Disco.

“The platform is already attracting a diverse array of clients from within the Middle East and elsewhere around the world,” Saunt adds.

Google’s funding will also be used to enhance semantic search and filtration at Disco.

*Major News Publisher Rolls-Out AI Text-to-Voice Service: Stories generated by 30 McClatchy newsrooms across the country will soon be available in voice format, according to Jessica Gilbert.

She’s senior director, product and experience, at news publisher McClatchy.

The news outlet says visitors at its participating digital news sites will be able to convert a text story to a voice story– simply by clicking a ‘play’ button under every headline.

Conversion will be virtually instantaneous, according to McClatchy.

“At a time when consumption of digital audio is stronger than ever, we’re excited to roll-out this new audio feature,” Gilbert says.

McClatchy’s pilot-tested text-to-voice at The Sacramento Bee and The News & Observer.

The result: story page views increased 89%, according to a McClatchy press release.

Plus, visits-per-user increased 95%.

*Fake News: Cheap AI Making the Scourge Worse: Increasingly reasonable prices for AI-generating writing tools and similar AI tools threatens to buttress the growing cancer of fake news, according to Christopher Ahlberg.

He’s CEO, Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm.

“Three or four years ago, this was all about expensive, covert, centralized programs,” Ahlberg says.

Now, “it’s about the fact the tools, techniques and technology have been so accessible, Ahlberg adds.

Plenty of news stewards – including Facebook and the CogSec Collab MISP Community – are fighting the good fight against fake news, according to Financial Times writer Hannah Murphy.

But the battle is a hard slog.

“Until the funding side of misinfo gets addressed — ideally alongside the fact that misinformation benefits politicians on all sides of the political aisle without much consequence to them — it will be hard to truly resolve the problem,” says David Bray, director, GeoTech Commission at the Atlantic Council.

*New Study Finds Healthy Growth In AI-Aided Content Marketing: AI tools designed to help automate the writing, analysis and monitoring of content marketing are headed for significant growth through 2026, according to a new study.

During the past few years, scores of businesses have doubled-down on their investment in content marketing.

That includes company messaging and promotion via blogs, social media posts, videos, case studies, white papers and the like.

This study, “Artificial Intelligence In Content Marketing Market Professional Survey Report 2020,” offers an in-depth analysis of how artificial intelligence is turbo-charging that content.

*Upclose: A New Toolmaker in AI Journalism: InsidetheNewsroom offers a 50-minute podcast interview with Francesco Marconi, founder of AI toolmaking company Applied XL.

The startup – which is partnering with the Boston Globe — is promising to develop AI tools that will serve-up story ideas, insights and other content from news databases.

Marconi is a longtime player in AI-generated news.

He helped spearhead AI implementations at The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.

Plus, he’s author of the new book, “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism.”

*Cable TV Service Provider Automates Closed Captioning With AI: Cablecast Community Media – a services provider for government, educational and community cable and streamed TV – is automating its closed-captioning feature with AI.

The move will “save community media centers the time and effort of separately researching, purchasing and implementing a captioning solution,” says Steve Israelsky.

He’s president of Cablecast Community Media.

The AI software powering the auto-captioning will be provided by ENCO Systems.

“Cablecast has a large and dedicated following in the community media market,” says Ken Frommert, president, ENCO. “They understand the needs of government and public access customers inside and out.”

“We’re thrilled to be working with them,” he adds.

A Return to Objective Journalism: A new AI-powered news site is promising to offer an objective look at the news by presenting journalism from all perspectives.

Dubbed “The Neutral,” the site’s goal is to quickly identify trending news and offer coverage on the trends from various news sources.

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“Our job is to explore new ways of supporting journalism that doesn’t rely on advertising or subscriptions in this kind of environment,” says Leigh Fatzinger, CEO, Turbine Labs – the AI company behind the new site.

*Google Offers Free Course in AI Journalism: The search titan – along with Journalism AI and VRT NWS – is serving up a free online course in AI Journalism.

The offering is designed to acquaint journalists with the fundamentals of AI — as well as feature insight on how the tech is changing newsrooms.

*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves

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Grammarly
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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.

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