Cybersecurity pros warn that hackers will soon be using AI to artfully craft malicious emails that appear to be from friends and colleagues.
Specifically, hackers will use AI to infiltrate the computers of your friends to study how they interact with you, how their calendar meshes with yours, how they share inside jokes with you – and even the precise style of writing they use with you.
The result: Malicious emails auto-generated by the AI, which will be nearly impossible to distinguish from the authentic article.
Click on a link in one of those imposters, and you could be downloading ransomware onto your work computer faster than you can type, “Yes, Nichole is feeling better now. Thanks for asking.”
Observes Mariana Pereira, director, email security products, Darktrace: “Hyper-realistic, machine-written copy is not some distant fiction.
“Rather, the technology required for this already exists today.”
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Sci-Fi Writers Collaborate With AI: A team of 11 sci-fi writers is collaborating with AI-generated writing software to create works of fiction during November and December.
The AI software was trained on the fiction genre by ingesting selected works of sci-fi.
That enables the software to structure sentences and understand relationships between characters.
The authors collaborate with the software by repeatedly feeding it a sentence and then waiting for it to spit back a sentence or paragraph that advances the story line.
That back-and-forth goes on until a work of fiction is completed.
The AI software “can trigger a lot of possibilities when you are writing,” says Stanley Che Quifan, an award-winning sci-fi writer who came-up with the idea to collaborate.
*With AI-Generated Reporting, Humans Sometimes Disposable: Sérgio Spagnuolo, who has Knight Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists, discovered this summer that AI-generated writing can render human journalists disposable.
Initially hunting for a journalist to furnish him with social media posts, newsletters and reports, Spagnuolo switched to a machine when he found that AI could handle the same responsibilities with ease.
Observes Spagnuolo: “After a few weeks, having worked on the budget and the targets I had in mind, I pivoted the whole plan and hired two part-time developers to create a Twitter bot and an automated report delivery system.
“In one stroke, I solved two problems: Feeding my project’s Twitter timeline and providing newsletter content for the users.
“After the launch, no human hands needed to touch those two streams of content.
“It was a classic scenario in which automation literally stole a journalist’s job.
“After all, why would I need someone producing content that my algorithms already provided me — almost free of charge?”
Ultimately, Spagnuolo decided to hire a human ‘community manager’ to oversee audience interaction with the content.
But one wonders: How many publishers – in a similar situation – would do the same?
*Zapier Now Integrates with AX Semantics: AI-generated writing firm AX Semantics now has an app that integrates with Zapier.
Zapier is a commonly used Web service that helps computer users link their Web apps together.
Using the app, computer users are able to create automated written reports and similar narratives drawing on data from commonly used programs like Salesforce, WordPress, Magento and Shopify.
All told, the new app enables users to feed data from more than 2,000 software packages into AX Semantics for easy processing into reports and other narratives, according to Sabine Schymik.
She’s a partner management officer at AX Semantics.
A free demo of the integration is available from AX Semantics.
*New GPT-3 Apps Auto-Create Ads: Savvy programmers are harnessing the power of auto-text generator GPT-3 to speed-up the creation of pay-per-click ads and landing pages.
Observes Ginny Martin, a writer for Search Engine Land: “Snazzy, for example, uses the OpenAI API — which launched in beta in June — to generate copy via GPT-3 for Google Ads, landing pages and taglines.
“More options, including emails, blog posts, Facebook Ads, and product descriptions are in the works.
Other software packages using the GPT-3 engine to create various templates for ads, blog posts and more include Copysmith and Copy.ai, according to Martin.
Observes Marting: “Getting started is simple.
“You feed in some training data such as company name, brand keywords, target audience and a description, and within seconds, you’ll get suggested copy back.”
For an in-depth look at GPT-3, check out: “GPT-3 and AI Writing: Stunning, if Imperfect,” by Joe Dysart.
*Intuit Standardizes Writing With AI: Financial software titan Intuit is using AI assistant software ‘Writer’ to bring uniformity to it corporate writing.
Essentially, Writer has been trained to guide Intuit writers to stick to the company’s standard terminology and phrasing as they create content about accounting, taxes and personal finance.
That’s an especially handy frame-of-reference, given that Intuit employs thousands of people who continually write about its products.
“It’s too hard to keep everything in your brain,” says Sarah Mohs, a senior content designer at Intuit.
She relies on Writer to help stay true to Intuit’s corporate writing style.
Mohs adds: “Looking things up only works if you know what you are looking for.
“The AI provides all those checks as you are writing — it definitely reduces the cognitive strain.”
*Overseeing the Overlords: Contrary to writers’ fears that AI will still their jobs, some AI enthusiasts see plenty of work ahead for copy editors as AI proliferates.
The reason: Automated writing’s prowess aside, AI still has a problem with nuance and meaning.
That can lead to foolish errors if left unchecked.
For example: AI can get stumped when it encounters a phrase like ‘Brooklyn Beckham.’
A copy editor—also known as a ‘sub-editor’ in parts of Europe — would most likely know that’s a moniker for a famous sports figure.
But AI can be flummoxed by the phrasing, according to Shane Creevy, head of editorial, Kinzen.
Observes Creevy: “I believe it is a myth that new innovations don’t need editorial oversight.
“If you’re going to build automated content curation without a sub-editor, you’re taking a needless risk.
“Just as editors need better algorithms, algorithms need better editors.”
*Making BERT More Perceptive By Adding ‘Eyes:’ Researchers at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill are combining AI language software BERT with computer vision to make it more perceptive.
The result: Tests using the experimental collaboration have found that BERT’s reading comprehension improved.
Says Thomas Wolf, chief science officer at Hugging Face, who is familiar with the research: “In NLP (Natural Language Processing), we had this huge breakthrough over two years ago.”
He adds: “Then suddenly, NLP was a field where a lot of things were happening and it kind of got ahead of all the other AI fields.
“But we have this problem of connecting text with other things.
“So it’s like this robot that is only able to talk but cannot see, cannot hear.”
This research “is one example where they managed to connect it to another modality and it works better,” Wolf adds.
*ALM’s Automated Legal News Gets an Update: Legal publisher ALM has updated its automated legal news product and rebranded it with a new name: Law.com Radar.
The service delivers automated summaries of breaking legal news.
Initially offering federal litigation news, the automated service has expanded to cover “corporate deals including mergers and acquisitions, venture financings, private equity deals, securities offerings, and real estate transactions,” according to Bob Ambrogi, a writer for LawSites.
*Yseop Offers Free Webinar on Automated Financial Reporting, Nov. 17: AI-generated writing firm Yseop is offering a free Webinar on financial report automation.
The digital event will feature a live demo of Yseop’s brand new automated financial report writer: Augmented Financial Analyst.
The demo includes time for Q&A.
*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.