Writers and others discovered this quarter that AI is poised to eliminate more jobs than they may fear, according to Rob Toews, a venture capitalist.
Simultaneously, the use of AI automation continued to proliferate across virtually all writing genres, featuring robot tech that can:
~Write fairly decent college essays
~Create hyper-local newsletters for cities and towns
~Crank-out article drafts for Wall Street Journal reporters
~Auto-generate financial reports — with no coding required
~Help millions of writers auto-complete sentences and/or write to a stylistic standard
~Glean and analyze opinion from thousands of people — and then auto-generate a narrative summarizing the key themes, trends and conclusions inspired by those perspectives
~Compete with the likes of one of AI’s most powerful text auto-generators, GPT-3
Meanwhile, two reports released in Q1 found that marketers and writers need to up-their-game to keep pace with the change – and sometimes havoc – that AI-generated writing is triggering.
Here are the details on those change milestones for Q1:
*AI & Jobs: A Starker Future Than Many Perceive?: AI is poised to eviscerate more jobs than some would have us believe, according to Rob Toews, a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners.
Observes Toews: “The notion that, at its best, AI will augment rather than replace humans has become a pervasive and influential narrative in the field of artificial intelligence today.
“It is a reassuring narrative.
“Unfortunately, it is also deeply misguided.”
Adds Toews: “AI’s core promise — the reason we are pursuing it to begin with — is that it will be able to do things more accurately, more cheaply and more quickly than humans can do them today.
“Once AI can deliver on this promise, there will be no practical or economic justification for humans to continue to be involved in many fields.”
*College Essay?: Get a Robot to Do it: 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 — 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.)
*Hyper-Local Newsletters Come to California: Nowhere News is promising to bring AI-driven newsletters — custom-tailored for cities and regions — to California this year.
The startup will be using data found in public records, government meetings, local school sports and online social media to generate news stories using AI.
In practice, Nowhere’s AI writes draft stories for human reporters, who pick-and-choose which stories are published – and add some stylistic flair to the final text, according to Nowhere News Editor-in-Chief Nathaniel Barling.
Barling says he hopes to have the AI-driven service covering news stories in 44 cities and regions across California by the close of 2021.
Nowhere News is a close replication of another hyperlocal news service in Britain — Radar — which has been auto-generating hyperlocal news from public databases since 2017.
*Wall Street Journal Experimenting with Automated Article Drafts: The Journal is toying with a new AI tool that auto-generates draft stories detailing the tone and direction of the world’s financial markets.
Writers from the Journal observe that reporters using the auto-generated drafts “can layer on analysis and insight — producing a richer story faster.
“With the computer focusing on the ‘what,’ our reporters can focus on the ‘why.’
“We made the decision to follow this type of automation because we know our members value the insight our reporters bring to our journalism, and wanted to help our reporters get there faster.”
The Journal has been using AI to help automate the production of news since the mid-teens.
*Google’s New AI Writer a Hercules: Google researchers say they’ve built a new, experimental AI writer nearly six times more powerful than GPT-3 – one of the world’s most formidable AI writing systems.
Essentially, the new tool is a ‘one trillion parameter transformer system’ – or nearly six times bigger than the 175 billion parameters GPT-3 boasts.
Observes Tristan Greene, a writer for The Next Web: “The big idea here is that enough brute force will lead to better compute-use techniques — which will in turn make it possible to do more with less compute.
“But the current reality is that these systems don’t tend to justify their existence when compared to greener, more useful technologies.
“It’s hard to pitch an AI system that can only be operated by trillion-dollar tech companies willing to ignore the massive carbon footprint a system this big creates.”
The closest competitor to Google’s system — OpenAI’s GPT-3 — put many AI writing enthusiasts in a swoon this past summer after its initial release.
While flawed, the text writing system nevertheless stunned many users with its ability to quickly auto-generate articles, emails, legal writing, poetry and more from just a few lines of text input.
A number of commercial applications using GPT-3 as a writing engine have already emerged.
Many more are expected to crop-up in 2021.
*Look Ma: AI Writing With No Coding: Yseop has released a new tool that enables finance pros to create auto-generated reports without writing any computer code.
Dubbed “Augmented Financial Analyst,” the AI-generated writing tool also mimics a user’s writing style.
According to Yseop’s press release, “With Yseop’s revolutionary and patented ‘intentions’ model that mimics financial analysts’ thinking, business users with no coding skills can accurately produce complex financial reports faster.
“AFA integrates data exploration and alerts to highlight key variations and values, allowing business users to quickly identify and examine specific events while providing valuable contextual elements.”
*AI Writing Assistants: An Updated Look: Analytics India offers a new look at AI-driven writing systems that correct your spelling and grammar – and go on to offer other suggestions to improve text.
Tools profiled include AI Writer, Word, Wordtune, WritingAssistant, Articoolo, ShortlyAI and Textio.
Interestingly, ShortlyAI uses GPT-3 to drive its system.
GPT-3 is an extremely powerful auto-text generator that was released in experimental form last summer.
Observes Sejuti Das, a writer for Analytics India: “Built on OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, this advanced AI tool (ShortlyAI) can make writing easier and faster, helping users eliminate the writer’s block.
“The algorithm not only continues writing the story started by the user, but also generates new creative ideas to develop the story.
“The AI can generate texts in a fraction of seconds.”
*2021 Study: With AI, Marketers Need to Up-Their-Game: A new study from the Marketing AI Institute finds that marketers’ lack of training and education in AI is holding back the tech’s adoption in the industry.
Specifically, 50% of marketers surveyed rated their understanding of AI at the beginner level.
And another 37% rated their understanding as intermediate.
Says Paul Roetzer, CEO, Marketing AI Institute: “Marketers see the power and potential of artificial intelligence to transform the marketing industry.
“But, it also demonstrates that we are just getting started in terms of understanding and adoption.”
*AI Decides: Is Prince the Coolest Artist?: IBM grabbed a chance to demonstrate its auto-debate analysis tool – Key Point Analysis — during the Grammys.
As music artists trekked to the stage to claim their awards, some fans engaged in playful debates on the Web, keypunching in their takes on debatable assertions like “Prince is the most groundbreaking artist of all time.”
The publicity stunt — designed to drive home the merits of IBM’s AI tool – enabled the company to analyze the fans’ responses, including:
*Identifying the heart of each argument
*Evaluating the quality of each argument
*Stitching together a ‘single, clear narrative’ reflecting the collective ‘wisdom of the crowd’ on both sides of the debate
All told, the event was a success in showcasing Key Point Analysis as a solution for companies and organizations looking to auto-generate written analysis of pro and con arguments on any topic.
You can check-out how IBM’s AI sliced-and-diced the debate about Prince on the Grammy Web site.
*Perspective: The Robots Cometh: How Artificial Intelligence is Automating Writing Jobs: Amidst the hoopla of all things artificial intelligence, writers are increasingly wrestling with a hard truth: It appears robots are coming for their jobs. This piece by Joe Dysart offers an updated look for 2021 at how the tech is threatening writers’ livelihoods.
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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.