A new study finds 77% of news publishers see AI as a key to their success during the next three years.
Publishers featured in the study currently use AI to help auto-generate news stories, manage paywalls, tamp-down reader churn and auto-surface archived content where appropriate.
Says Dean Roper, director of insights, World Association of News Publishers, the group that spearheaded the study:
“This is not relegated to just publishers with deep pockets, nor to the usual pioneers in the business.
“Small publishers all over the world are innovating, partnering (and) developing AI solutions for their companies.”
In other AI-generated writing news:
*In-Depth Guide: SEO Content Machine: One of a number of AI writers that promise automated writing optimized for the search engines, this tool gets a mostly thumbs-down response from KasaReviews.
Observes KasaReviews: “Unfortunately, SEO Content Machine has the same issue like other article generator tools.
“The article generated doesn’t have natural flow and it often skips from topic to topic.
“Text is unrelated to topic, so you often need to edit — a lot.
“For me, SCM still needs a lot of work. The software just can’t replace (a) human and create 100% human readable content.
“Between content generator tools and spin rewriters, I would rather choose (a) spin rewriter.”
SCM is one of a number of AI-generated writing programs that also promise SEO optimized copy.
Others include :
~Jasper (formerly Jarvis)
*New Google Tool Auto-Summarizes Documents: It’s getting ever easier finding AI apps that will quickly summarize documents.
Witness: Google’s new update to Smart Canvas, which enables you to auto-summarize content within Google Docs.
Observes Stephanie Condon, a writer for ZDNet: “With automatically-generated summaries in Docs, users will be able to gain an understanding of shared documents quickly.
“While the summaries are generated with built-in intelligence, users can also edit summaries manually. The feature is now generally available.”
*Cloud-Based AI-Transcription: Subject to Snooping?: An in-depth article from Politico finds that a popular AI transcription service — Otter.ai — may be leaking reporters’ recordings and interviews to third parties.
Observes Phelim Kine, a writer for Politico: “Otter and its competitors — which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint — are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections.”
Those porous protections “may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact,” Kine observes.
Adds Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security: “Any journalist who transcribes an interview with a confidential source and puts it up on Otter has got to live with the possibility that Otter will wind up giving that transcript to the FBI.”
*New AI Writing Tools for Marketers: One Take: Tech strategist Johan van Mol offers a clear-eyed look at AI writing tools using the GPT-3 writing engine in this piece.
His conclusion: Most of the tools he test-drove are okay for generating short bursts of text — say a paragraph-or-so long.
But for longer articles, users must continually re-trigger the AI to expand the length of the text, one paragraph-or-so at a time.
Observes van Mol: Developing “a long meaningful text requires multiple retries in current AI models.”
For an in-depth look at the current state of the market in AI writing tools, check-out, “Ultimate Guide: Artificial Intelligence Writing Software,” by Joe Dysart.
*AI Email Personalization: The Way Forward: Content marketer Barb Mosher Zinck is convinced that email personalized with the help of AI is key to marketing’s future.
Granted, being careful not to tread on privacy when you’re personalizing email sent to your customers is important, Zinck says.
“But equally important — or maybe even more critical — is designing an email program that thinks about the person on the receiving end as an actual person,” Zinck observes.
*First Person: AI Writing Tools I Use: Yael Klass, a content director at Similarweb, offers a run-down on some of her favorite AI writing tools.
Among Klass’ picks:
~MarketMuse to help with search engine optimization
~Cobomba and HubSpot to find trending topics on the Web
~HyperWrite for rewriting copy to your personal specifications
~Clearscope for predicting how your copy will rank on the search engines
*AI Editor/Assistant Scores $1 Million in Funding: AI editor/assistant Linguix — which specializes in double-checking and punching-up the writing style of your copy — just snared new funding.
Paste any text into Linguix, and you’ll get back suggestions and corrections for grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style.
Linguix also includes an explanation for every correction it suggests — which will not only help you to fix issues right away but also improve your writing in the future.
The app has been a hit with English-as-a-second-language users, who are looking to correct — and improve — their use of English.
*AI in Newsrooms: Might as Well Get Used to It: A panel of AI experts is hosting a free online event that offers the core advice: The time for questioning AI in journalism is over.
AI is already in many newsrooms, they note.
So the only move left to consider is how to make peace with the tech.
The event is slated for Feb. 28, 2 p.m. — 3:30 p.m. CEST, on Zoom.
*AI Big Picture: Elon Musk’s Next Conquest: General AI?: When a man who’s made electric cars cool and rockets-into-space a commercial reality, you tend to listen when he’s mulling the idea of adding Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to his bag of tricks.
Essentially, Musk is toying with the idea of embedding AGI in his Tesla cars.
Tweets Musk: “Tesla AI might play a role in AGI, given that it trains against the outside world.”
AGI — the kind of intelligent-about-everything AI portrayed in the movie “Her” — is considered the ultimate, yet unconquered frontier of artificial intelligence.
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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.