Google has rolled-out a prototype auto-writer designed to help fiction writers with story planning, writing and editing.
Dubbed ‘Wordcraft,’ the experimental tool offers the features of a traditional text editor — along with additional commands writers can use to trigger AI-powered enhancements to the work.
Specific actions a user can prompt the AI assistant to execute include:
~Sketching a story outline
~Writing a story
~Adding text to words a that writer has already entered onto a page
~Offering several additions to words a writer has already added to a page
~Rewriting or elaborating on selected text on a page
Google’s academic paper on Wordcraft is available on arXiv.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*In-Depth Review: AI Writer: MakeMoneyBro offers a detailed look at one of the first auto-text writers ever to hit the market — AI writer.
First released in 2015 — long before the emergence of GPT-3 — the Web-based service is designed for the specific task of auto-generating long-form text.
MakeMoneyBro’s take on AI Writer’s ability to deliver on that promise: The tool offers ‘decent’ — if somewhat unstructured — writing.
The review offers a few examples of the kinds of texts AI Writer can generate — although each article is about 200 words long.
For many, 200-word articles are not considered ‘long form.’
Observes MakeMoneyBro: “There are no complex forms to fill in here — just a simple process of entering your keyword related title and letting the app do its thing.
“It’s actually amazing what they could come up with, bearing in mind how little input I had to give.”
MakeMoneyBro’s bottom line on AI Writer: “The current state of AI is not the best for longer-form content, and this is a platform that focuses on it almost exclusively.
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent.
“But it’s just too much hassle for me to edit, frankly.
“At that point, I might as well write the content myself.
“Having said that, I might consider it as a content re-writer, as it seemed to give better results than a typical article spinner — even those that claim to use AI.
*Lexio Wins AI Breakthrough Award: AI-generated writing pioneer Narrative Science took home an AI Breakthrough Award for its recently released AI writing product Lexio.
The tool — designed to auto-generate written reports from company databases — takes great pains to make analyzed data easily accessible to everyday workers.
Observes Stuart Frankel, CEO, Narrative Science: “Lexio is specifically built for employees to easily understand and use data in a way that has never been done before.
“Unlike today’s typical BI tools, Lexio anticipates what employees need to know so they can make faster and better data-driven decisions.
“Data without context is useless, and Lexio brings that context and understanding to every single employee in plain language and in a consumer-like experience.”
(For an in-depth look at the trend in auto-generated company reports, check-out, “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart
*New Tool Auto-Generates SEO-Friendly Copy: Marketers look to auto-generate Web copy that has been optimized for search engines will want to check-out AI.DEV.co.
It’s a new tool designed to ingest already written marketing copy — and then spit-out similar copy that will enjoy higher search engine returns.
For years, copywriters have spent considerable effort creating marketing copy that is search engine optimized.
That includes employing the right keywords and other text characteristics that can catapult a company’s Web page or Web site to the top of search engine results.
AI.DEV.co promises to generate such SEO-friendly copy automatically.
Observes Nate Nead, principal of both SEO.co and DEV.co: “AI.DEV.co is a tool that makes SEO copywriting simpler, faster, and cheaper – and therefore more accessible to a wide range of options.”
*Craftly.AI Joins Fray in AI Writing Tools: Yet another new AI writer powered by GPT-3 — Craftly.AI — is promising the automate the creation of Web page texts, social media posts, blog posts and the like.
Essentially, the company press release bills its product as “A web-based artificial intelligence writing platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze content research and write original articles that are plagiarism-free.
“Forget weeks — craft high-performing content in seconds.”
GPT-3 — a supercomputer-run AI writer that stunned many computer scientists at its release last summer — is being used as the engine for a number of new AI writing apps that run atop GPT-3.
(For an in-depth look at GPT-3, check out: “GPT-3 and AI Writing: Stunning, if Imperfect,” by Joe Dysart.)
*AI Expert: New China Alternative Dusts GPT-3: AI Expert Alex Zhavoronkov says China’s new AI-powered auto-writer leaves gold standard GPT-3 in the dust.
Dubbed Wu Dao 2.0, the auto-writer “has been trained on 1.75 trillion parameters, which is nearly 10 times greater than the 175 billion parameters GPT-3 was trained on,” according to Zhavoronkov.
Wu Dao 2.0 also powers a ‘virtual student,’ Hua Zhibing, who can engage in a number of tasks.
Observes Zhavoronkov: “Hua can learn, draw pictures and compose poetry.
“In the future, she will be able to learn coding.
“This learning ability of Wu Dao 2.0 is in stark contrast to GPT-3.”
*Free-for-Download: Open Source Competitor to GPT-3: AI researchers and others looking to play with an extremely powerful auto-writer can download one for free from EleutherAI.
The open source group of AI researchers say their latest competitor to GPT-3 — GPT-J — can be downloaded from GitHub.
While GPT-J is powered by six-billion parameters — much less that GPT-3 — the auto-writer nevertheless offers similar performance to GPT-3, according to EleutherAI developer Aran Komatsuzaki.
EleutherAI also offers a live demo version of GPT-J that users can visit to type-in any combination of words and receive near-instant auto-writing in return.
*Some AI-Generated Writing Tools Degrading Scientific Literature: Researchers say auto-writers like GPT-3 are degrading the accuracy of scientific literature published in some of the world’s most respected academic journals.
Observes Martin Anderson, a writer for Unite.AI: “Perhaps of most concern is that the papers studied also contain scientifically inaccurate or non-reproducible content presented as the fruits of objective and systematic research.”
Anderson adds: That indicates “that generative language models (like GPT-3) are being used not only to bolster the limited English skills of the papers’ authors, but actually to do the hard work involved — and, invariably, to do it badly.”
The finding points-up one of the readily admitted limitations of auto-writers like GPT-3: Essentially, such tools sometimes auto-generate factually inaccurate and even illogical writing.
Such drawbacks are especially true of longer-form articles and texts created by GPT-3 like auto text writers — i.e., articles 500 words or longer.
*Small News Outlets Get AI Lift from Google: Google is offering free training in AI-powered news to a select group of journalists and developers from small news outlets in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Starting in September, the six-week, online course will be taught by a Who’s Who of journalists and researchers who promote the use of AI in journalism.
The course is offering seats for approximately 20 journalists and researchers.
Partnering with Google on the course is Polis, a journalism think tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
*Knight Center: Call for Papers on AI and Journalism: The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has put out a call for AI papers for an upcoming special issue of the International Symposium on Online Journalism Journal.
Observes guest editor Seth C. Lewis, a journalism and communications professor at the University of Oregon: ” “This is an exciting moment for the study of AI and news.
“There is obviously a lot of hype and confusion when it comes to the nature and impact of artificial intelligence.
“But it’s also apparent that we’re beginning to see the effects of AI — for better and for worse, in ways certain and uncertain.”
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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.