Harry Shun – previously the top exec for Microsoft AI – has made the leap to a new position as chairman of the board at AI-powered news outlet Newsbreak.

It’s a dramatic move indicating just how tempting the future prospects are in AI-generated writing and related tech.

Even if you have a cherry job at Microsoft.

Like many AI-powered news services, Newsbreak personalizes news story selections for its users based on reader location, content preferences and similar personalization data, according to GeekWire writer Todd Bishop.

Once the content selections are made, Newsbreak displays the personalized content to readers – including the ads associated with that content, according to Bishop.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Rival News Service to Radar Goes Live in UK: A pair of United Kingdom journalists have launched ‘Just the Facts’ – a smartphone news app that delivers hyperlocal news to UK neighborhoods.

Users simply enter their post code and view news that’s most relevant to where they live.

“Just The Facts aims to deliver hyperlocal news stories without editorial comment or bias, in a unique and contemporary manner,” says Mark Anderson, former managing director at News Group Newspapers.

Anderson is partnering with former Daily Mail journalist Mark Allsopp in the Just The Facts venture.

“These hyperlocal stories are generated quickly and accurately — using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools — which disseminate validated statistics into information relevant to you, and where you live,” Anderson adds.

Like UK news service Radar, Just The Facts mines data from publically accessible government and similar databases to auto-generate its local news.

*GPT-2 Gives Poets a Run for Their Money: Poetry readers could not discern machine-generated poetry from verses penned by humans — in a recent study by Cornell University.

The researchers conducted the study by feeding the first line of a poem to auto text generator GPT-2, and then asking GPT-2 to finish out the verse.

The result: A poem GPT-2 created that the researchers liked best was submitted for review to poetry readers – who could not tell if it had been written by a machine or a human being.

One caveat: Poetry generated by GPT-2 that was randomly selected for review — rather than hand-picked by researchers — was smoked-out by reviewers as machine-generated.

*Looking Into the Inner Workings of an Award-Winning AI Chatbot: Built In writer Jeff Link offers readers a close-up on Mitsuki with this article.

Mitsuki is a chatbot that has won first place five times in an annual competition for the most human-like chatbot.

Like most AI motor-mouths, Mitsuki is simply a spin on AI-generated writing software, which is triggered by questions or comments input by human users.

The difference with Mitsuki is that relatively speaking, it’s really got the gift-of-gab compared to the competition.

“If Mitsuku doesn’t experience human emotions, nor self-identify as human, she certainly has a personality,” Link observes.

“Without diving too deep into the ontological briar patch of what constitutes identity and being, it’s reasonable to say Mitsuku is relatable — and if not empathetic, at least warm and validating,” he adds.

While the field of AI chatbots is young and best practices are foggy at best, conversational dialogue will become a specialized skill set that user experience designers can leverage to distinguish themselves, according to Travis Nelson, head of product and design at Pandorabots — the company that created Mitsuku.

Adds Link: “Designers who excel (at creating AI chatbots) are likely to be those who can economize words: The Hemingways, not the Faulkners.”

*Facebook’s Rolls Out It’s Latest AI-Driven Chatbot: While AI-powered chat has yet to completely dazzle, Facebook indicates its latest prototype – dubbed Blender – is getting us closer to that goal.

The bot -– which generates text from AI in response to a question from a human – can spew-out about 14 statements in a conversation before trailing off into nonsense-land.

Granted, such a limitation is not optimal for distilling the meaning of life.

But it may be enough to get your product sold.

“These models aren’t able to go super in-depth,” says Emily Dinan, a co-leader on Facebook’s Blender project.

*Key Advantages of AI in Marketing: A Rundown: Nabeel Amud, founder of Mogul Press, ticks-off five ways AI can help automate your marketing – including the use of AI-generated writing.

Chatbots driven by AI-generated writing, for example, are one of the most commonly used tools, he says.

“They can become a 24/7 customer service, and above all, capable of generating conversations,” Amud adds.

Another genre of AI-generated writing help are tools that can communicate with audiences more precisely and efficiently, Amud says.

“Nowadays, good content is not just about composition and writing: It is also about making data-driven content,” Amud says. “It is essential to create content from the data collected about audiences, to give them personalized content that resonates and is useful.”

*Automating Marketing Copy – and More – With AI: Search Engine Journal offers an in-depth look in this article at how AI is automating the creation of marketing copy – and more.

” Your life is already machine-assisted,” observes SEJ writer Jes Scholz. “Your marketing can be, too.”

*AI-Generated Entertainment News, In Action: News outlet Monok.com says every item on its English-speaking entertainment feed is auto-generated by AI, according to Monok.com CEO Adam Sam.

*Bloomberg Focuses on AI-Automating Cornavirus News: AI-generated writing pioneer Bloomberg is retooling some of its AI software to auto-generate stories on the epidemic.

We’ve “started to look at the data around the virus: Are there automated stories we can produce?” says Chris Collins, senior executive editor at Bloomberg.

“For example, we’ve used the technology to track company statements — to identify and show what all the major companies are saying about coronavirus,” Collins says.

“When it comes to the recent slew of corporate earnings, you change tack because different metrics become priorities,” he adds.

And “we’ve trained our models to look beyond the usual metrics and find cash flow or debt levels, which are suddenly more in focus for obvious reasons,” Collins says.

*AI Researchers Hope to Generate Raw Coronavirus Data for Journalists: Development of a new automated Coronavirus tracking system is underway, which can be used by journalists and others to unearth early warning signs of new flare-ups of the virus.

“AI researchers are teaming with tech companies to build automated tracking systems that will mine vast amounts of data, from social media and traditional news, for signs of new outbreaks,” observes Science writer Adrian Cho.

*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves

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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.