A freelance editor who was replaced by AI robots at the MSN news site warns the tech is doomed.

“Now, at a time where context is needed most, MSN is handing the reins from editors to engineers,” observes Bryan Joiner.

Essentially, MSN’s AI robots are not nuanced enough to stay true to MSN’s core mission, according to Joiner.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*Natural Language Generation: The State of Things: Robert Dale offers an in-depth look at the current state of Natural Language Generation – also known as AI-generated writing.

Dale is a principal consultant at Language Technology Group.

It’s a consultancy designed to offer unbiased advice on AI-generated writing.

“Today’s commercial NLG technology appears to be relatively simple in terms of how it works,” Dale observes.

“Nonetheless, there is a market for the results that these techniques can produce,” Dale observes.

“Much of the real value of the solutions on offer comes down to how easy they are to use and how seamlessly they fit into existing workflows,” he adds.

*Proppping-Up Retail in the Age of the Coronavirus: AI Can Help: Retailers promoting with text need AI more than ever, according to Perry Malm.

He’s CEO of Phrasee, an AI tool that churns-out short ad copy for marketers – such as email subject heads or company slogans.

“In sensitive times such as these, ensuring that your brand’s marketing copy is on-brand, sensitive to the circumstances at hand, and tailored to the unique tastes and preferences of your audience has become a digital marketing imperative,” Malm observes.

“AI’s inherent ability to test and optimize marketing copy at scale — and in real time — make it a perfectly suited tool for this complex task,” Malm adds.

*AI and Student Writing Assessement: A Video Walkthrough: Jing Xu, principal research manager at Cambridge Assessment English, offers a walk-through on how AI writing assessment works.

Key advantages of AI writing assessment, according to Zu, are:

*High reliability of test scores

*Near-instant scoring

*Near-instant reporting of scores

*On-demand testing

*Learning-oriented reedback

*PR Pros Still Waiting for AI Tools: While journalists, writers and copywriters are seeing AI transform their professions, PR pros are mostly left waiting on the sidelines, according to Stephen Waddington.

He’s managing partner at Wadds, a business consulting firm.

“It appears that innovation in tools in PR — and adoption by practitioners — has changed little in the past two years,” Waddington adds.

“AI is clearly having an impact on related, more lucrative areas of communication and marketing,” he observes.

“But these tools have yet to be applied to PR,” he adds.

*Powering Email Marketing With AI: A Gameplan: Dana Murphy, president, Masterful Marketing, offers a gameplan for enhancing email marketing with AI in this piece.

Specific uses Murphy recommends are:

*Segmentation and personalization of text

*Catchier email subject heads

*Automated testing of marketing emails

“With the perfect combination of rule-based email marketing and constant optimization, you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns while reducing the time you spend on them,” Murphy observes.

*GPT-3: Some Not Doing Cartwheels: While scores of writers have been dazzled by the prowess of GPT-3, an AI-powered writing generator, not everyone is impressed.

“The apparent plausibility of GPT-3’s performance has led – again – to fevered speculation about whether this means we have taken a significant step towards the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – ie, a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can,” observes John Naughton, a writer for The Guardian.

“Personally, I’m skeptical,” Naughton adds.

“Although it’s a really impressive achievement to be able to train a system this big and capable, it looks more an incremental improvement on its predecessors rather than a dramatic conceptual breakthrough,” Naughton observes.

*News Outlets in Developing Countries Mostly Devoid of AI: While the world’s top-tier nations have been embracing AI in journalism for a number of years now, there’s been little activity in the developing world, according to Mohamed Abdulzaher.

He’s a media consultant at the United Arab Emirates Government Communication Office.

“Many advanced countries are spending on media technologies more than annual budgets of ten African countries,” Abdulzaher observes.

Meanwhile, many developing countries — reliant on state-owned media — are still stuck with the same technology they’ve been using since the 1960’s and 1970’s, Abdulzaher adds.

*Bootcamp: How to Automate High Quality Content: Hamlet Batista offers a 20-minute video on AI tools you can use to create automated content.

Batista is CEO of Ranksense and a columnist at Search Engine Journal.

*Prepare to Meet Your AI Overlords in 2025: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicts artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence within the next five years.

“We are headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans,” Musk says.

“I think that time frame is less than five years from now,” Musk adds. “But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”

*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.