The day you dreamed of when you could get a machine to write your high school or college essay is here.
Turns out, a new AI-generated writing tool can churn-out countless – albeit mediocre – college essays for you on virtually any subject.
The finding, from EduRef.net, a news outlet covering education, emerged after a panel of college professors judged a series of essays on the same topics — some written by humans, others by machines.
The result? The AI tool, using the powerful auto-text generator GPT-3 as its writing engine, averaged a solid ‘C’ grade for its efforts.
Moreover, AI took no more than 20 minutes to crank-out each paper.
Granted, AI’s fair-to-middling grade is not overly inspiring.
But as a Machiavellian college student might crow: ‘C’s get degrees.’
(For an in-depth look at GPT-3, check out: “GPT-3 and AI Writing: Stunning, if Imperfect,” by Joe Dysart.)
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Instant Text-to-PowerPoint Presentations, Courtesy AI: Microsoft is offering a new capability in Word designed to auto-create PowerPoint presentations from Word documents.
The feature – which will roll-out across the Web over time – can be accessed by opening the online version of Word and choosing “File,” then “Transform,” then “Transform to PowerPoint presentation.”
Microsoft’s AI puts together the presentation by summarizing various sections of your document with images, icons, videos, themes, and fonts, according to ZDNet.
*Documate: Custom Automated Documents, Sans Coding: Artificial Lawyer offers a look at Documate – an auto-writing tool for attorneys that requires no knowledge of coding – in this piece.
Essentially, the tool enables lawyers to build auto-document creators for highly specific, in-house needs.
Says Dorna Moini, CEO, Documate “With “Documate, not only do our customers build internal document automation.
“They also build legal products to generate documents and expert systems.
“Anyone can hire a developer to build a Web application.
“But we empower the lawyer to do it on their own.
“Our lawyers can use powerful functions on our platform, like loops, complex calculations, and nested logic to your heart’s desire – with the ease and UX of a modern, no-code platform.”
*AI Writing Evaluators: Understanding Nothing, Judging All: As the use of AI-driven writing evaluation programs proliferates across education, one writer harbors an overarching concern: The gee-whiz software does not actually ‘understand’ the writing it’s grading.
Observes Dave Frame, a Web developer with a master’s degree in creative nonfiction: The greatest problem facing auto writing examiners (AWEs) “is their ability to be gamed.
“AWEs can only measure. They cannot understand.
“Without human oversight to verify meaning, computers can’t evaluate significant features of strong writing like organization of ideas or sound argument.”
*United Robots Offers New AI-Generated Writing Resource Nook: Journalists looking for a quick study on how AI is transforming the news business can check-out a newly created resource nook on the topic, courtesy United Robots.
A leading AI-generated writing service provider, United Robots offers an advocacy look at the new tech, featuring white papers, infographics and Webinars with titles like:
~”Newsroom Automation and How to Leverage It”
~”Robots as Newsroom Resources”
~”Reimagining Local Sports Through Automation”
*Key Player in AI Journalism Offers Free, Virtual Seminar March 26: The National Press Club is offering free access to a virtual seminar March 26 on AI and journalism.
Squiring the talk will be Francesco Marconi, a longtime player in AI-generated news.
Marconi is founder of AI toolmaking company Applied XL.
He helped spearhead AI news implementations at The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.
And he’s also author of the book, “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism.”
*AI Writing Meets Work-in-Progress Reports: Add Work-in-Progress Reports to the growing list of business docs auto-written by AI.
The reports are critical to the construction industry, which uses them to monitor active construction jobs — and ideally ensure those jobs stay on budget.
Specifically, the automation of such write-ups can empower project managers “by producing frequent reports and hyper-accurate reports — because it explains the numbers and the state of a project with textual summaries and a story narrative of how the project is developing,” according to Jennifer Bittinger, president, Array Studio Group.
Array offers an AI tool that automates the writing of Work-in-Progress Reports.
(For an in-depth look at how AI is automating the writing of business reports, check out “Business Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.)
*Coming Soon: An Open Source Equivalent to GPT-3: While the source code for GPT-3 – one of the world’s most powerful auto-text generators – is a closely guarded secret, an open source equivalent is coming soon, predicts Nature Magazine.
Nature writer Matthew Huston reports that Connor Leahy – a college student already famous for creating an open source equivalent of OpenAI’s previous auto-text engine, GPT-2 – is now working on a GPT-3 equivalent.
Even more intriguing: Leahy says he and a group of volunteer researchers believe coming-up with the code for a GPT-3 competitor will be easily doable, according to Huston.
The only real challenge is mustering the immense computing power needed to run an open source equivalent to GPT-3, according to Huston.
And that computing power has already been promised by cloud provider CoreWeave, according to Huston.
All told, this Nature article offers an extremely in-depth, wide-ranging look at the state of GPT-3.
*Researchers: Standards Urgently Needed for Auto-Text Generators Like GPT-3: Researchers from Stanford University and OpenAI say time is running out for sorely needed standards governing the development of powerful auto-text generators, according to an article in Venture Beat.
The researchers worry that the release of an open source clone of GPT-3 could be posted on the Web in a matter of months.
Their underlying fear? An open source equivalent — conceivably available to anyone — could enable malicious users to easily generate a torrent of fake news, biased writing – and ‘disappear’ untold numbers of writing jobs.
“Developers may only have a six- to nine-month advantage until others can reproduce their results,” the researchers observe in a recently published paper.
*Call For Papers on AI-Generated Writing: The 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation has put out a call for papers.
Deadline for submissions is May 31, 2021.
The conference is slated for September 20-24, 2021 in Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
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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.