The vast majority of sports stories generated by local football site Klackspark are now written by robots, according to Cecilia Campbell.
She’s chief marketing officer at United Robots, a pioneer in AI-generated writing.
Launched in 2016, the site has been cranking-out about 850 articles-a-month on European football in Östergötland, a province in southern Sweden.
Human “reporters do the really interesting stories that also convert people,” Campbell says.
“It started as a free site,” Campbell adds. “But it did so well, they now put it behind a paywall.”
In other AI-generated writing news:
*They’re Here: Semi-Automated Blogs: Web site creation firm Zyro has rolled-out a new AI tool it says semi-automates the production of blogs built around common topics.
Available free, the AI tool generates blog topic lists and titles for common industries like travel, food, fashion and music.
Also included is a copywriting tool, which helps flesh-out the titles with engaging text.
Plus, there’s a heat-mapping tool that optimizes blog layout and image selection.
“Artificial intelligence has long been used in the marketing space,” says Thomas Rasmyas, head of AI, Zyro. “But only now are we seeing its potential to help marketers with the most creative aspects of their work.
“This new tool goes far beyond marketing automation, using AI to generate completely original ideas.
“Not only will this help marketers and content professionals struggling with writer’s block — it will also stimulate entirely new ideas for creative content and future campaigns.”
Study: Majority of Journalists Fear AI: A new poll released by the Press Gazette – a publication covering journalism in the UK — found that 69% of readers surveyed see AI as a job threat.
The finding – drawn from more than 1,200 poll respondents – undermines the ongoing assurances of many proponents of robot written journalism.
They insist AI will enable journalists to focus on highly creative pieces – and leave mundane, formulaic writing to the machines.
“My instinct is that, over time, this will start to take on more of the less enjoyable, repetitive work – and allow journalists to go out and do the human element of the work,” says Joseph Hook, editor, Radar.
But other early adopters of AI-generated writing indicate journalists could be getting more than they bargained for as they work alongside their silicon-based sidekicks.
“I think we will get to the stage where we don’t need the human journalist,” says Jane Barrett, global editor for media news strategy at Reuters.
“But it will be up to each publication as to what they are happy to put through – and there will be regular testing,” she adds.
*Phrasee: Master AI Tinkerer of Short Ad Copy: Barb Mosher Zinck takes a fresh look at Phrasee in this article.
It’s an AI tool that churns-out short ad copy for marketers – such as email subject heads or company slogans.
“Phrasee generates thousands of potential copy ideas — whether it’s a headline, a subject line, or something else,” observes Zinck.
“It then takes all those copy variants and puts them through their deep learning engine to rank the best ones in order of predicted performance,” she adds.
Marketers simply pick the best of the best, test them live on the Internet and then stick with what delivers optimum results.
Perry Malm, the company’s CEO, believes Phrasee “should be a foundational tool in the marketing stack — like Photoshop is to designers,” Zinck observes.
“We aren’t there yet, even though there have been versions of this kind of application available for a while,” Zinck adds.
“I suspect it will come in time as more marketers look for opportunities to speed-up the time to get campaigns out the door, allowing them to focus their efforts on other projects,” she says.
*Using AI Bots the Right Way: A Customer Experience Perspective: Jeannie Walters offers seasoned advice on how to do customer service via AI bot in this article.
Walters is CEO at Experience Investigators, a company that specializes in optimizing customer experience interfaces.
Like many online customers, Walters is often nonplussed by AI chatbots, which seem to get flummoxed after just a few questions.
In the end, those misfires become an impediment to a sale or service — rather than an aid.
Essentially, AI chatbot technology — AI-generated writing that is triggered by human questions — is “not simply something to just drop into your customer’s journey and hope for the best,” Walters says.
It needs to be done right. And Walters offers her perspective on how in this 45-minute video.
*A New Twist on AI and Legal Writing: GPT-3, an extremely powerful AI-generated writing tool developed by OpenAI, could have a major impact on the law, according to Jason Morris.
He’s an attorney at Round Table Law and teaches at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law.
GPT-3 “does not seem to be a major change in technology,” Morris observes. “It seems to be an application of the same technology, but to way more data, on way stronger computers, and with a way bigger model.”
*Opinion: Embrace the Inevitable: Let Machines Handle the Mundane: Editors and writers fears that AI will replace them are only partially true, according to May Habib.
She’s co-founder of Quordoba, an AI writing assistant that enables everyone at the same company write with the same style, terminology and brand voice.
On-the-ground, AI is simply handing off the minutia of writing to the machines so that editors and writers can work on more creative projects, Habib says.
“People don’t have to dedicate their lives to chasing down wayward hyphens and language redundancies,” Habib says.
She adds: “Humans are slower and more inconsistent anyway.
“Rather, editors should focus on creative work.
“Storytelling, researching, and strategizing are unique tasks that only humans can do to make content worth reading.
“Even if computers could create and organize content, people are hesitant to trust it — especially with the surge of bots and fake news.
“So let AI work in the margins.
“Technology can handle the micro-edits and monotonous jobs, while humans capitalize on creativity.”
*Conversational AI: Poised for Growth: Conversational AI – or AI-generated writing that responds to questions from humans – appears poised for significant growth through 2026, according to a new report.
The tech has been cropping-up in all sorts of applications, including in-home digital assistants, chatbots on Web sites and automated call processing at call centers.
More innovative applications of conversational AI are enabling machines to read and respond to human gestures.
A free sample of the report is available from Kenneth Research.
*Close, But No Cigar: Automated News Fact-Checker Brings Back Humans: Tech & Check, an AI automated fact-checking service for journalists, is bringing humans back into the loop.
“We’ve found that artificial intelligence is smart — but it’s not yet smart enough to make final decisions or avoid the robotic repetition that is an unfortunate trait of — um, robots,” write Bill Adair and Mark Stencel.
The duo’s experience has implications for AI-automated news aggregation services like MSN, which recently replaced about 50 flesh-and-blood editors with AI.
“Our voice-to-text and matching algorithms are good — and getting better — but they’re not great,” they add. “And sometimes they make some really bad matches. Like, comically bad.”
The result: A lot of the fact-checking generated by Tech & Check is now overseen by humans before it’s emailed to reporters.
“Bots are good at repetitive tasks,” Adair and Stencel write. “But for now, they still need help from us.”
*AI in Journalism: Perspective from a Pioneer: Nick Diakopoulos, a key player in the introduction of AI in newsrooms, offers his take on the state of AI and journalism in this 42-minute podcast.
A pioneer in the field, Diakopoulos is an assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University.
He’s currently working with the Washington Post to find ways to automate coverage of the upcoming presidential election this fall.
*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.