Highly creative writers are probably safe from AI’s automation of writing, according to some industry experts evaluating the tech in Q2, 2020.
It’s a perception championed by word-lovers like Nick Montfort, a poet who insists machines simply cannot compete with the likes of Yeats, Homer and Dickinson.
Simultaneously, AI-generated writing is beginning to experience real push-back from its human competitors — including 56% of marketers in a recent poll, who chastised AI writing as a creativity gremlin and job killer.
But despite the headwinds, AI-generated writing overall continues to press inexorably forward.
Francesco Marconi, a longtime player in AI-generated news, for example, advises writers that AI will be changing the very nature of newsroom jobs – and that writers who adapt have the best chance of remaining employed.
And highly respected market research firm Gartner predicts that the production of 30% of all digital content will be at least partially automated within the next two years.
Stefan Åberg, a managing editor at Swedish news publisher, says he’s building an army of robot writers to auto-produce basic news.
And tech wizard billionaire Marc Cuban recently became a major investor in yet another publisher focused on AI-generated sports news coverage.
Meanwhile, AI solutions provider Demain.ai announced in Q2 it soared past publication of 150,000 articles during the previous 12 months.
Granted, AI-generated writing is making good on its promises to find creative ways to cover news stories everyday journalists don’t cover.
Researchers at Cal Poly and University of Miami, for example, are developing an artificial intelligence system to write news stories from data buried in the Web-accessible databases of state and local governments.
But even so, news outlet RedShark wonders aloud if the only conceivable outcome of full implementation of AI-generated writing is a world in which all media is dominated, guided and produced by AI.
Here are the details on Q2’s trend milestones:
*AI Job Loss: Highly Creative Writers Are Probably Safe: Writing demanding significant creativity is probably safe from AI job loss, according to Bryon Reese, CEO, GigaOm, a technology research company.
“It will be hard — if not impossible — for computers to be able to do jobs that require creativity or abstract thinking, because we don’t really even understand how humans do these things,” Reese says.
“Possible jobs include author, logo designer, composer, copywriter, brand strategist, and management consultant,” Reese says.
Perhaps.
But company’s like Persado are replacing copywriters at ad slogan writing – once considered a highly creative skill.
And United Robots, a leading AI-generated writing company, has added automated interviewing to its auto-news-story services – making the resulting copy ‘appear’ to be more creative.
*Computerized Poetry: Not Ready for Prime Time, Poet Says: As writers of all stripes eye AI as a potential job killer, computational poet Nick Montfort remains unperturbed.
“Computers are tireless in mining data, producing combinations, and working towards objective functions,” Montfort observes.
“They can be extraordinarily dogged and compelling explorers of language. And of course, they can fill out formal patterns.
“But – here I’m leaning on something journalist Italo Calvino said in the 1960s, which remains true – they don’t have individual and cultural histories.
“So, right now, while a computer can help us see things in data, it’s hard for a text to actually mean something deep to a computer.”
*Some Marketers Skittish About AI in Marketing: As AI-generated writing and similar tools are increasingly adopted by marketers, many fear AI could negatively impact their efforts.
Specifically, 56% of marketers surveyed for the 2020 State of Branding Report thought AI-generated writing and similar tools threaten to:
* Diminish creativity
*Eliminate jobs
*Hamper marketers’ ability to differentiate their brand in the marketplace
Moreover, only 24% of marketers thought AI will impact marketing positively.
And 23% doubted that AI could automate marketing at all.
The report was released by Bynder, a digital asset management company.
Bynder’s findings differ sharply from the views of major global marketers like Dell, Staples, American Express and JP Morgan Chase.
All have embraced AI-generated writing to punch-up their marketing.
*AI Newsrooms of the Future: What the Jobs Will Look Like: “In the future, we will see more newsrooms asking for writers that understand how to work with AI, editors that understand how to oversee smart tools and programmers that can design journalistic computer programs,” observes Francesco Marconi.
He’s a major player in AI-generated news and helped spearhead AI implementations at The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.
Marconi is also author of the new book, “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism.”
Here’s what many future jobs in journalism will look like as AI burgeons across the industry, according to Marconi:
*Automation Editors: These retooled editors will be responsible for ensuring AI integrations in the newsroom go smoothly – as they simultaneously maintain editorial reliability.
*Computational Journalists: These 2.0 versions of the ‘ink-stained wretch’ will continue to weave their way with words as they embrace the latest in AI-generated writing and research tools.
*Newsroom Tool Managers: Scouts for ever-better AI newsroom technologies, these experts will also continually train on-staff journalists to ensure they get the most — and latest — from AI.
*AI Ethics Editors: Stewards of the ‘good fight,’ these leaders will be “responsible for the transparency and explainability of algorithms, as well as the use of training data,” Marconi observes.
Ethics editors will also “develop best practices for methodological disclosure and for quickly addressing any issues related to algorithmic errors or bias,” he adds.
Insights into AI in the newsroom abound in Marconi’s new book, which offers an in-depth, detailed, on-the-ground look at how artificial intelligence is transforming journalism.
*Winds of Change: Robot Writers Take the Web: AI-driven content creation and marketing programs like NewsCred, Sprinklr and Contently will generate more than 30% of all digital content within the next two years, according to Gartner, a market research firm.
Specifically, the AI tools will increase productivity and make advertising more effective, according to study authors Nicole Greene and Laurel Erickson.
But they will also disrupt the creative process, Green and Erickson add.
*Cue the Army of Robot Writers: Stefan Åberg, a managing editor at Sweden-based VK Media, says he’s building an army of robot writers to auto-produce news on weather, traffic, property sales, sports matches and more.
His reasoning: An army of robot writers can regularly produce copy much more efficiently than humans.
“Since the editorial team has begun using automation extensively, the number of digital subscribers has increased by 70 percent,” according to writer Alexandra Borchardt.
*Another AI Sports News Service Gears for Launch: AI sports news provider Sportlogiq is ramping up to auto-write private, internal reports for 30 NHL teams and 74 pro sports teams, according to Forbes.
The service will also use sports data about those teams to auto-generate news stories for five major broadcast networks.
“These AI-driven insights, gathered from their proprietary datasets, will provide exclusive information on underlying team performance, trends, and systems to help teams win more games,” observes Forbes writer Todd Karpovich.
Meanwhile, the breaking news stories generated by Sportlogiq will offer major broadcasting networks entertaining content for viewers, Karpovich adds.
Sportlogiq is backed by funding from Mark Cuban, owner, Dallas Mavericks, according to Karpovich.
AI-generated writing for the service is provided by Arria.
*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.
*Coming: AI Ears on State and Local Government: Researchers at Cal Poly and University of Miami are developing an artificial intelligence system to auto-generate coverage of state and local governments.
The research team says the coming tool will be a prototype news wire service, which will capture text and video buried in the Web-accessible databases of state and local governments for use as basic news stories for journalists.
“The intent is to help local news organizations by augmenting their staff,” said Lindsay Grace, University of Miami School of Communication’s Knight Chair of Interactive Media and a co-lead researcher on the project.
“The combination of AI and natural language processing creates an app to do some of the basic elements of reporting: collecting quotes, who said what,” Grace says. “What we’re doing is taking that data and converting it to journalistic prose.
“We’ll start the reporting for you, but we’re not looking at replacing journalists.”
The system will rely on algorithms and AI-generated writing to deliver on its promise, according to the researchers.
Funding for the project comes from a $200,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.
*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.
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.”
*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.