Q3 saw some significant advances in AI writing that promise to catapult the tech further into the mainstream.

New services, for example, now promise to make it easier to train an AI autowriter to render prose in your personal writing style.

And monthly fees for unlimited use of AI writing – enabling you auto-generate an infinite number of words with AI – are now as low as $60.

Meanwhile, RobotWritersAi.com released a special report detailing an easy-to-digest collection of videos that can teach you the basics of writing with AI in one day.

And an article in Education Week essentially proclaimed that the integration of AI writers into classrooms is simply a matter of time.

Still other eyebrow-raising developments:

~A major academic report concluded that the robot take-over of much of journalism is real

~Attorneys can look forward to even greater customization of AI-generated legal contracts

~Zoom now offers real-time, voice-to-text translation of video meetings in multiple languages

Here’s the rundown on the top ten stories in Q3 that unearthed AI’s ever-growing impact on the writing world:

*Now AI Writes in Your Voice: Writer Christoper Kokoski says he’s found an easy way to build an AI tool that auto-writes in his style.

An avowed non-programmer, Kokoski says he’s using a service on the Web – Riku.ai – which enables even a novice to quickly build a custom tool to write in the style of any human writer.

Kokoski uses the tool by first loading countless numbers of articles he has written into Riku.ai’s prompt builder.

Then he chooses a supercomputer-driven autowriter like GPT-3, also accessible from within the Riku.ai interface, to ingest and study his articles — and ultimately discern and mimic his writing style.

Once the custom autowriter is created, Kokoski says triggering the tool to write an article in his voice is simply a matter of loading-in a detailed article outline – complete with a series of prompts – and then allowing the tool to work its magic.

Kokoski is so jazzed with his results, he’s decided to create a custom autowriter using Riku.ai for each one of his Web sites – which cover different topics.

Meanwhile, another AI writing service provider –Writer — now offers similar, ‘auto-generate writing in your own style’ capability with its new module ‘CoWrite.’

Bottom-line: Sites like Riku.ai and tools like CoWrite could become game-changers for AI writing.

The reason: While many pro writers have eyed AI-writing with interest during the past few years, many have hung back, unwilling to use tools that produced a style of writing that sounded too generic.

Sites like Riku.ai and tools like CoWrite could change all that.

Essentially, once pro writers find they’re able to auto-generate articles in their precise writing styles – i.e., writing that meets their exacting standards of phrasing, wit, taste and the like – it will be tough for them to resist using those tools to at least auto-generate some writing.

*Monthly Fees for Some AI Writers Plummeting: You can subscribe to AI writing services now for as low as $60-a-month — and generate an unlimited number of words with that deal — according to reviewer Jamie Freya Knott.

That’s the going rate for HeyFridayAI, an automated writer that may not be the most polished on the market — but sure is one of the cheapest.

Fortunately, some other AI writers are also dropping their monthly rates — or are expected to go lower in coming months.

Helping drive that trend is a major cut in rate to use GPT-3.

GPT-3 is the supercomputer-driven AI writer that serves as the ‘engine’ for dozens of commercial AI writers.

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.”

*Report: The Robot Take-Over of Journalism is Real: According to a new report released by AI4 media, AI is eliminating writing jobs previously held by humans.

Observe AI4 researchers: “Several newsrooms have fired journalists because their work was now done by robot journalists.

“The most known example is Microsoft replacing 27 journalists by an AI system in 2020.”

The report’s findings fly-in-the-face of relentless, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ assurances from numerous news publishers during the past few years — which have adopted automated writing while assuring no writing jobs would be lost as a result.

“We foresee that in the near-future, every newsroom worldwide will make use of AI technologies in one or another way,” the researchers add.

*Automated Reporting: A Brand New Revenue Stream: What’s New in Publishing offers a gung-ho look at how publishers are using AI writing to cover sports, real estate sales, traffic incidents, company annual reports, weather, and more.

Says Helena Tell, an editor-in-chief at Swedish publishing house Bärgslagsbladet: “For a small newsroom, automation is necessary.

“We’re forever prioritizing — and sometimes I feel all we ever do is choose not to cover things.

“If we can use technology and automation to perform tasks as well as we reporters would, there’s no doubt that’s what we should do.”

*AI Writing: Great for Human-to-Machine Collaboration: 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 enabled human writers to produce more words more quickly, 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.

*AI Writing in the Classroom: A Done Deal?: Some educators are resigned to the fact that the widespread use of AI writing tools by students is simply a matter of time, according to this article in Education Week.

Says Ray McNulty, a longtime Vermont educator: “There’ll be a transition where this will become second nature.”

The real question for educators, McNulty adds, is how to artfully add AI writing tools to the curriculum.

Adds McNulty: “What we’re trying to do is have school districts know this stuff is coming.”

*Zoom Releases Real-Time, Voice-to-Text Translation for Business: Zoom One Business Plus – a premium version of Zoom for business – now features auto-translation for 10 languages.

Zoom’s auto-translation is also available with Zoom Enterprise and Zoom Enterprise Plus, two other business-grade versions of the video meeting service.

Supported languages are Simplified Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

*Automated Legalese Gets More Customizable: Already helping businesses quickly process scores of generalized agreements, AI-automated contracts from Evisort can now be trained to feature uncommon clauses and wording as well.

Essentially, the instant-contract company has opened an ‘Automation Hub,’ which enables users to train Evisort software to auto-write contracts that are more customized.

Evisort says the process needed to train its software for custom wording is non-technical – although it does take a bit of time.

*Google Update Threatens Automated Writing: Google has begun rolling-out an update to its search engine that could penalize some sites that use AI-automated copy.

Central in the search titan’s crosshairs: Web sites and other digital properties that appear to have used automation extensively to serve-up content on a wide variety of topics.

The upshot: If a digital property is found guilty of this ploy, it could be buried at the bottom of search engine returns for the primary keywords that the site uses to attract Web surfers.

Google estimates the roll-out of the update should be complete by early September.

Google issued a similarly chilling warning against automated writing earlier this year, flatly stating that it equates AI-generated writing with spam.

But there’s an enforcement problem.

Essentially, it’s not always easy for Google to distill the difference between AI-generated writing and good-old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood rendered copy.

It’ll be very interesting to see how hard the update hits users of automated writing.

*RobotWritersAI.com Releases Special Report: Learn the Basics of Writing With AI in One Day: If you’ve been hanging back from trying AI writing for fear that the learning curve is too treacherous, take heart: A new series of free videos enables you to learn the basics in one day.

Released by AI writing company Jasper, an industry leader, the collection of mostly one-to-three minute videos – a couple of dozen in all – encompasses all you need to know to get started in AI writing.

Appropriately dubbed “Boot Camp,” the cheeky and irreverent tone of the video series makes getting acquainted with AI writing a hoot.

Plus, the video collection – which can be easily viewed in an afternoon — gives you the confidence to launch-off on your own and become a power user of AI writing software.

— MORE on learning the basics of AI writing in one day —

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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.