While most AI-generated news stories are simple news reports about sports, business, crime and other data-rich musings, AI-generated opinion may be on its way.
Systems like IBM’s Project Debater already generate a pretty good simulation of opinion – and could be harnessed to crank-out opinion pieces for news outlets, according to Cait O’Riordan.
She’s chief product and information officer at the Financial Times.
“IBM-generated opinion could become significant,” O’Riordan says.
Adds Calum Chace, a writer for Forbes, regarding Debater’s impact on human writers: “There is a genuine question about whether new thought leaders will find it harder to get established.”
Chace offers a wide-ranging look at journalism fueled by AI-generated writing in this Forbes piece.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*California-Style AI Journalism Gears for Growth: Crosstown, an automated journalism site serving Los Angeles, is gearing up for aggressive expansion, according to Gabriel Kahn.
He’s the editor of Crosstown and a professor of professional practice at University of Southern California.
“Soon, we’ll be rolling out 110 different neighborhood newsletters — each with automatically formatted stories and charts,” Kahn observes.
“This will allow us to offer some level of coverage to every corner of the city with minimal extra costs,” he adds.
The news service generates multiple stories on the same subject – say home burglaries – by populating a fill-in-the-blank story template with info from a database – say a database on Los Angeles home break-ins.
Observes Kahn: “One story on home burglaries becomes 110 different stories about 110 different neighborhoods — each with specific info on the number of crimes in the community.
“The best part? The costs don’t rise.”
Currently, staff at Crosstown is spare: Kahn and two-part time reporters – along with some help from AI-generated writing – churn-out all of Crosstown’s articles.
“Our goal is to create a Crosstown-in-a-box model that can easily be set-up anywhere,” Kahn adds.
“With a reasonable upfront investment, we can deploy Crosstown’s software, mapping and data-sorting tools in a new city,” Kahn observes.
“Other newsrooms could use this to track the vital signs of their city, along with every neighborhood in it,” he adds.
*Getting Conversational With Your Slack Database: Analytics software company Knowi is offering Slack users the ability ask questions of their Slack databases – and get back answers in the form of charts and other graphic illustrations.
Sample queries include “What was our net new revenue last quarter?” and “Show me our most active app users by month.”
A popular online messaging and collaboration tool, Slack is used by thousands of businesses and organizations.
This article offers a step-by-step guide on how to integrate Knowi into Slack.
*California College Offers Auto-Transcription for Students: Online lectures at California State University, Chico will be auto-transcribed to text this fall – courtesy of speech–to-text software from Otter.ai.
The app works with Zoom and other popular video conferencing platforms.
Plus, it automatically generates a collection of keywords for each transcription it creates.
Otter.ai offers a free version of its transcription service, featuring 600 minutes of real-time transcription per month.
Pricing for additional minutes starts at $8.33/month.
*Copyright Free?: AI Works Generated from Published Fiction/NonFiction Currently Unregulated: While tools like GPT-3 rely on ingesting mind-boggling amounts of published text to become AI text generators, a few are asking – who owns the copyright to works created by those machines?
Some believe all the authors who helped generate all that published text that is ingested should be compensated.
I would “love to ‘read in’ the works of Stephen King, Dan Brown, John Connolly, Jonathan Mayberry, my favorite authors alongside my work into an AI and have it generate a first draft that is a sum of everybody’s work,” says Joanna Penn, an independent author.
“I give it some prompts to come up with a work. That should be a really good book. I rewrite a bit and edit.
“Who owns that book?
“There’s no law against this right now. But ethically, I would think that Stephen King et al. deserve some money and credit.
“If there is no license, and no law to prevent such use, then natural language generation systems could write the next prize-winning or bestselling book — based on the works of existing authors.”
Blogger A.A. Abbott examines Penn’s questions — and more on AI and copyright — in this post on the Alliance of Independent Authors Self-Publishing Advice Center.
*Some Bemoan GPT-3’s Commercialization: While GPT-3’s creators – Open AI — have released the code behind previous versions of its AI text generator, this time around, they’re keeping it secret.
Observes Dave Gershgorn, a writer for OneZero: “The research firm says it’s simply too large for most people to run.
“And putting it behind a paywall allows OpenAI to monetize its research.
“In the past year, OpenAI has changed its corporate structure to make itself more appealing to investors.
“It dropped a nonprofit standing in favor of a ‘capped-profit’ model that would allow investors to get returns on their investment if OpenAI becomes profitable.
“It also entered into a $1 billion deal with Microsoft, opening collaboration between the firms and giving OpenAI priority access to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.”
The problem: All that secrecy and exclusivity could foster a digital future of AI haves and have-nots, according to Mark Riedl.
He’s an AI professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies natural language processing.
“If we believe that the road to better AI in fact is a function of larger models, then OpenAI becomes a gatekeeper of who can have good AI and who cannot,” Riedl says.
*Content Curation Tools: A Recommended Sampling: The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute offers its top picks of content curation tools in this piece.
High on the list is Medium, an online publishing platform that doubles as a content creation tool.
“You can use Medium to create publications and gather articles around a specific topic or theme — and even open your publication up to contributions from other writers on the platform,” observes Jared Loftus, chief revenue officer at Rasa.io.
Not surprisingly, Loftus also recommends a tool by his own firm, Rasa.io.
It’s an AI-driven email newsletter platform, which enables users to send personalized e-newsletters.
The service uses artificial intelligence to monitor what content performs well with each reader, increasingly personalizing the newsletter to the reader with each new read and each new send.
Other cool tools featured on the list include Anders Pink, elink.io, Feedly, Quuu, Scoop.it, UpContent and Curata.
*With AI, Better Chatbots: Priya Dialani makes the case that chatbots powered by AI can do more – and converse much more artfully — with this piece.
“Artificial intelligence gives a human touch,” to chatbot conversations observes Dialani, a writer at Analytics Insight.
“The bot comprehends the customer’s inquiry and triggers a precise response in the same manner in which humans can understand each other’s concerns and give a reaction accordingly,” he adds.
Still other advantages with AI chatbots: more engaging, conversational and lively discussions – along with continual refinement, according to Dialani.
Says Dialani: The “chatbot learns from each discussion it has with the clients. It analyses the past interaction to improve the current response.
“This movement assists with improving the proficiency of bot reaction.”
*AI-Powered Chatbots Help With Coronavirus Outreach: Chatbots driven by AI-generated writing have played a significant role in answering questions on governmental Coronavirus hotlines, according to Governing.
“The software platforms — which use artificial intelligence to respond to human questions — have become a key part of state and local governments’ rapid pivot during the pandemic,” observes Governing writer Mark Toner.
“Three-quarters of states are now deploying chatbots to respond to COVID-related challenges,” Toner adds.
Those include “assistance with applications for unemployment insurance and fielding questions about symptoms and testing,” according to Toner.
Next up, many governmental users are hoping to roll-out a new generation of more sophisticated Coronavirus chatbots that can answer more questions – and offer answers with greater depth.
“Government solutions are rapidly evolving,” Toner observes.
Top Ten List for Natural Language Generation Released: Analytics Insight has released its list of the top ten companies in natural language generation for 2020.
The journal’s rundown features key companies familiar to those tracking AI-generated writing — including Narrative Science, AX Semantics, Arria NLG and Yseop.
But there other companies that popped-up on the list that are working in related spaces, such as Microsoft, with its Text to Speech API and Textengine.io, which offers an online automated content service.
*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.