The European Union is anxious about the direction of AI in journalism and is calling for its regulation.
Europe’s governing body has issued a formal declaration and four resolutions on AI in journalism.
Observes Sam Cox, a writer at Silicon Republic: “With AI occupying such a large part of the future market and technology, journalism will need to train its critical eye on the software — both for what it can gain from its use, and what its dangers are.”
Specifically, the EU is looking to create safeguards to ensure AI fosters:
~Freedom of Expression
~The Safety of Journalists
~Credible News Reporting
~Special Emphasis on Reliable Reporting on Health Issues –Such as the Coronavirus
You can check-out the full text of the EU’s declaration and four resolutions on the Web.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*In-Depth Review: Frase.io: Jon Wright, a digital marketer with 20+ years experience, offers an upbeat review of AI-generated writing software Frase.io in this piece.
Observes Wright: “I’m a heavy user of Frase.io and several other AI-powered content optimization tools.”
The software is perfect for bloggers and other article writers who are looking to auto-generate writing by simply punching a keyword phrase or phrases (up to three) into Frase.io, according to Wright.
Once triggered by that input, Wright notes the software “will go off and fetch the top 20 Web sites that rank in Google for that term.
“It will then show you lots of different things about those top 20 articles — for example, average word count, the average number of images, the headings used in each article, the key topics mentioned across all the articles etc.
“The whole idea here is that Frase is saying, ‘Here are the top 20 results for your chosen search term.
“So this is what Google considers to be the best articles on the topic.”
Once armed with this frame-of-reference, Frase.io can auto-generate an article for you on the topic.
Or, Frase.io can monitor your own writing of an article or blog post on the topic — advising you on phrasing and similar features so your article or blog post mirrors the patterns found in similar articles that rank highest on Google.
Observes Wright: “It is a great way to create SEO optimized content because in effect it is showing you all the keywords to use, LSI (latent semantic indexing) words, synonyms, what sort of length it needs to be etc.”
Bottom line: This is an extremely in-depth review and Wright pulls-no-punches when extolling the benefits of Frase.io — or focusing a microscope on its shortcomings.
One caveat: Wright does implore readers — via a clickable link — to give Frase.io a try at the close of his review.
Frase.io starts at $44.99/month.
*Zoho Jumps Into Automated Business Reports: Zoho, a major player in business productivity apps, has jumped into the automated business reports space.
The company has rolled-out new business intelligence software, which enables users to auto-generate written reports from company databases.
The new tool also enables users to ask for insights into company data — which are answered by the software via auto-generated text responses.
Observes Thor Olavsrud, a writer for CIO: “Adding such natural language capabilities is in line with the latest trend toward ease-of-use by self-service BI (business intelligence) vendors.”
(For an in-depth look at the trend in auto-generated company reports, check out, “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.)
*Microsoft Offers Auto-Insight Reports from Company Databases: VentureBeat offers a look in this piece into a new tool from Microsoft that scans company databases for insights that are auto-generated in text form as a series of topics.
Dubbed ‘Microsoft Viva Topics,’ the software essentially creates a continually updated Wikipedia-like domain of topics for any business database it scans and monitors.
Observes John Winn, a project lead at Microsoft: “Inside an organization, there is huge value to having a knowledge base be created automatically — to make the knowledge discoverable and useful for doing work.
“Of course, the knowledge base can still be manually curated — to fill gaps and correct any errors.
“In fact, we have designed the Alexandria machine learning to learn from such feedback, so that the quality of the extracted knowledge improves over time.”
*AI-Generated Writing Pioneer Scores New Funding: Sweden-based AI-generated writing pioneer United Robots has scored $EURO 1.5 million in new funding.
The company has been on a tear during the past two years, squiring auto-generated news writing at a number of media outlets in Sweden and beyond.
Essentially, news organizations are using United Robot’s tool to automate the writing of news in sports, traffic, crime and real estate.
One of United Robots’ sports implementations was for Dutch Media Group NDC, which is using AI-generated writing to auto-produce coverage of 60,000 soccer matches (also known as ‘football’ matches in Europe).
Observes a United Robots’ post: “Robots will write the match reports, while photos and comments from coaches will be collected through a crowd-sourcing platform.
“The result: NDC will offer unique local journalism which will give local communities – teams, players, coaches and fans – a stake in the sports reporting.”
Says Ard Boer, sport product manager, NDC: “Thanks to automated journalism, we’re able to write about every single local football match, coverage that’s not provided by anyone else.
*Oh Great — Now Exams Can Be Auto-Generated, Too: While few students will be doing cartwheels over news that many more exams will be auto-generated soon, many teachers will probably feel differently.
Educational company Finetune now has a patent-pending on an AI-tool that can auto-generate test questions.
Observes Sara Vispoel, chief assessment & learning officer, Finetune: “No one who is responsible for test development has ever complained about having too many good test questions.
“Shortages of these questions reduce the measurement quality of tests and decrease the value of information coming from them.”
*Q&A: A Chat With an AI-Generated Writing CEO: Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute offers a Q&A with the CEO of Anyword in this piece.
The AI software has been endorsed by Jeff Bullas, a long-time digital marketer.
Observes Bullas: “With Anyword, all you need to do is add a URL from your Web site, such as a product or sales page, select the type of copy you need, and the AI software will generate original content optimized for performance.”
Adds Yaniv Makover, CEO, Anyword: “For instance, for a cereal brand that wants to promote the nutritional aspects of their product, AI will need to receive a very simple description talking about that aspect.
“Anyword will then wordsmith the right variations that are demographic-specific, coming up with new and creative ideas to talk up nutrition.”
*Content Automator Snares $2.2 Million in Seed Funding: Simplified, a software package designed to automate numerous facets of content creation — including copy, imagery, format and sizing — has scored $2.2 million in new funding.
Observes Jordan Cook, a writer for TechCrunch: “Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels.
” For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media.
They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background.
“From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.”
*ZDnet’s List: The Top Five AI Writing Apps: Highly respected tech pub ZDnet has come out with what it considers the top five AI writing software services.
Specifically, ZDnet likes Writesonic, Wordsmith, AI Writer, QuillBot and Article Forge.
The article offers a breakdown on each, offering its take on which service to opt for — based on your personal writing need.
*Pew Study: Ethical AI Will Probably Elude Us: A new Pew study finds commerce will most likely shrug at ethical concerns as it increasingly integrates AI into business and society through 2030.
Specifically, 68% of those surveyed expect ethical concerns to be ignored as AI increasingly automates the world into the foreseeable future.
Observes Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft: These AI systems are “primarily being built within the context of late-stage capitalism — which fetishizes efficiency, scale, and automation.”
All told, Pew surveyed 602 leaders in technology, business and activism for its analysis.
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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.