In an extensive study evaluating the impact of AI on writing, Stanford University found AI makes writers more productive.

The university invented its own AI autowriter – dubbed ‘CoAuthor’ – for the evaluation, and invited 60 writers to give it a whirl as a collaboration tool.

The results: Stanford found CoAuthor increased writer productivity as measured in the number of words produced versus the time they spent writing, according to Andrew Meyers, a writer for VentureBeat.

Plus, sentences CoAuthor helped write seemed to “have fewer spelling and grammatical errors, but higher vocabulary diversity than the human-produced writing,” according to Meyers.

All in all, sounds like a great tool to help write college essays.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*In-Depth Guide: Power Listing: MyAmazonGuy gives Power Listing – an AI writer specifically designed to auto-create product description listings on Amazon – an ‘okay’ in this 22-minute video on YouTube.

This is an extremely helpful guide, offering easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions on how to use the AI tool.

One interesting feature of Power Listing: The tool enables you to grab descriptions of similar products already listed on Amazon, which can be reworked by the AI to help you create your own product description.

*GPT-3’s Cost Drops Dramatically: Great news for all users of AI writing: The cost to use GPT-3 – the supercomputer-driven AI writer that serves as the ‘engine’ for dozens of commercial AI writers – has dropped considerably.

Observes Eric Hall Schwartz, a writer for Voicebot.ai: “OpenAI has massively reduced the cost to use its GPT-3 API to as little as a third of the initial price, depending on the specific sub-model.

“The company shared that the new pricing plan goes into effect in September and could offer a lot of new companies a chance to use the language model for synthetic media — including writing and visual art.”

*Now There’s an AI Writer Just for Rappers: Bringing new meaning to ‘specialization,’ a new startup has released iRap – an autowriter designed solely to help rappers come-up with song lyrics.

Rappers can use the software by inputting starter lyrics – which are then shuffled around by iRap in an effort to ‘rap-optimize’ them.

Observes Joseph Henry, a writer for Tech Times: The software “relies on the alliteration of the nouns, verbs and adjectives to bring out the best possible outcome of the piece.”

*Using AI to Summarize How-To Videos: Researchers have come-up with an experimental system that auto-summarizes How-To videos.

Observes Martin Anderson, a writer for Unite.AI: The system identifies “pertinent steps from the video and discards everything else, resulting in brief summaries that quickly cut-to-the-chase.

“The resulting summaries have a fraction of the original video’s runtime, while multi-modal — i.e. text-based — information is also recorded during the process.”

That would potentially enable another summarizer to automate the creation of a WikiHow-style blog post on the same How-To, according to Anderson.

*Nature Releases Guide to AI Writers for Academics: In yet another sign of the increasing specialization of AI writing, Nature Magazine has released a guide to autowriters just for academics.

Apps that get the nod include:

~DeepL Translate

~Writefull

~Paperpal

~Linguee

~Academic Phrasebank

*Snapshot: Search Engine Land’s Pros and Cons of AI Writing Tools: This bible of search engine optimization has released its updated evaluation of AI writing tools.

The take-away: Autowriters are definitely helpful.

But content creators need to keep in mind that with autowriters:

~Writing quality can suffer

~Google may penalize your Web site in search engine returns if it’s unhappy with the AI writing you use

~The content you auto-generate may not exhibit expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness – key metrics Google uses to reward or punish digital content

*AI Writer Now Available for Apple: Apple users feeling left out when it comes to AI writing tools can take heart: A new AI writer specifically designed for the iOS operating system is now available in the Apple store.

Observes Eric Hall Schwartz, a writer for Voicebot.ai: “The new app, a first for Apple’s App Store, extends the natural language processing assistance offered by ParagraphAI to a potentially enormous new audience.”

ParagraphAI has already been available as a Chrome extension for some time.

*Most Americans Clueless About AI’s Growing Influence in Journalism: Only 25% of Americans realize that AI can sometimes auto-generate news stories that are as least well written as those by human writers, according to a 2020 university survey.

Moreover, only 48% of respondents were certain they’d even read, seen or heard something about AI in 2020, according to the survey — released by the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Observes Sarah Diedrichs, a writer for Futurity.org: “Although artificial intelligence has a growing role in journalism, research finds that Americans don’t know about AI’s role in their lives—or their news.”

*AI Big Picture: AI Apps That Would Make Dr. Dolittle Proud: Scientists are creating AI software packages that attempt to interpret what animals are saying – as well as talk back to them.

Says Tom Mustill, author of the forthcoming book, “How to Speak Whale:” “This is like we’ve invented a telescope — a new tool that allows us to perceive what was already there — but we couldn’t see before.”

Adds Emily Anthes, a writer for The New York Times: “Studies of animal communication are not new.

“But machine-learning algorithms can spot subtle patterns that might elude human listeners.

“For instance, scientists have shown that these programs can tell apart the voices of individual animals, distinguish between sounds that animals make in different circumstances and break their vocalizations down into smaller parts — a crucial step in deciphering meaning.

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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.