Australian News Outlet Cranking-Out 3,000 AI-Generated Articles a Week
News Corp is now among the growing list of media companies that are all-in on creating AI-generated news stories.
The Guardian reports the news outlet is spitting out about 3,000 AI-generated news stories each week that are focused on weather, traffic reports and fuel prices.
The news stories appear in 75 news publications across Australia — all owned by the media goliath.
For writers, the unblinking automated efficiency driving the creation of the news stories can be intimidating.
For example: Currently, production of the 3,000 stories/week is overseen by four staff members at News Corp.
That works-out to about 750 stories-each-week squired — with the help of AI – by one person at News Corp.
And on a daily basis, that means just one person — with the help of AI — is producing 170 stories for News Corp.
Not bad for a day’s work.
In other analysis of AI-generated writing news:
*Unleashing Your Inner Grammar Snob: In-Depth Guide — Best AI Editing Tools 2023: MarkTechPost offers a great rundown of the top tools you can use for checking grammar, spelling, punctuation and the like.
Besides well-known choices, including Grammarly and ProWritingAid, the guide also takes a look at special-use editing tools.
Sapling, for example, is dedicated to helping you write when you’re using any messaging service.
And Trinka AI specializes in AI editing help for technical and academic writers.
*How AI Took My Copywriting Job: Writer Graham Isador explains that once ChatGPT showed-up at his corporate copywriting gig, it was only a matter of time before his job was history.
Introducing ChatGPT to the team, Isador’s boss explained that copywriters would no longer be needed for writing.
Instead, they were assigned to simply enter prompts into the wildly popular autowriter ChatGPT to auto-generate copy.
The dream of Isador’s boss: Double the staff’s output with AI.
Observes Isador: “Suddenly, my day-to-day was no longer writing ads.
“It was editing the work of a robot.
“The meeting was a come-to-God moment — I felt like a cow being asked to collaborate with a butcher.
The uphshot?
“When my contract came up, it was not renewed,” Isador observes.
*QuickStudy: AI Writing — Everything You Should Know as a Writer in 2023: Writer Walter Akolo offers an excellent, detailed and extremely thorough primer on AI writing in this piece.
If you’re catching up with AI writing for the first time, this article is a great way to get up-to-speed.
Observes Akolo: “As a writer, if you remain in your comfort zone and don’t find creative ways to use AI writing assistants to boost your creativity, you’ll soon be obsolete.”
*Outwitting Obsolescence?: The Case for Embracing AI as a Copywriter: Add Shane O’Neil to the growing cadre of copywriters who are using AI writing tools day-to-day.
In this piece, he details his primary uses for the tech at the moment:
~Auto-writing copy
~Optimizing copy for search engine discovery (SE0)
~Analyzing audiences and competitor content
*Spielberg Wannabe? Grab Your Director’s Chair — No Experience Necessary: For many tasks powered by AI, we’re getting to the point that going from thinking about getting something done — and actually getting it done — requires virtually no effort.
Case in point: Lucas, a new tool that auto-generates videos triggered by just a few text prompts.
Observes Cheryl Rodewig, a press spokesperson for Idomoo, the maker of Lucas: “Lucas produces a complete video with all related assets — such as script, footage and voice-over — based on simple text prompts like ‘places to visit in NYC.’
“No learning curve, no video production experience required.”
*Gwyneth Paltrow Reads Your News: Is it Hot in Here, or is This Just Really Stimulating Journalism?: News App Artifact has come out with a new feature that will read your text news to you in a choice of voices — including in the voice of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Observes writer Sarah Perez: “The feature won’t just offer a robotic-sounding voice as some other text-to-speech engines provide, but will instead introduce a variety of natural-sounding voices that can be customized by selecting different accents and audio speeds.
“Though Paltrow and Snoop Dogg are the only official celeb voices (available with the new feature), there are other fun voices to choose from.
“For instance, one voice dubbed ‘Mr. President,’ sounds like Obama, while ‘Dwight’ is meant to resemble Dwight Schrute from “The Office.””
*YouTube’s Text Summaries: AI’s Solution to Your Video Commitment Issues: Wondering if that one-hour video on YouTube is worth your time?
YouTube has a solution.
It’s currently testing-out a new AI tool that auto-generates written summaries of the videos you’re thinking about spending some time with.
*Lost in Translation? Never Again, with YouTube’s Aloud: If you’re looking to reach people who speak different languages with your video, YouTube has the answer.
Its new, free tool, Aloud, automatically translates your video into the language of your choice — and then offers a selection of synthetic voices you can use for your production’s voice-over.
Observes writers Nilesh Christopher and Andrew Deck: “The dub can take just minutes to generate.
“The pilot currently includes the option to dub videos into English, Spanish, and Portuguese” — with more languages on the way.
*AI Big Picture: Mark Zuckerberg’s Freebie-to-the-World — Altruism or Apocalypse? Untold numbers of AI programmers across-the-globe will now be able to experiment and improve upon a super-powerful AI writing engine that was released for free use by Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg.
The AI software — which is also capable of writing computer code, auto-generating graphics, performing complex mathematical calculations and more — is about as powerful as the AI autowriting engine that drives ChatGPT, according to writer Shirin Ghaffary.
Zuckerberg’s thinking: Instead of jealously denying access to his extremely valuable crown-jewel of AI writing, why not release the code to the world and have tens of thousands of programmers improve on it simultaneously?
It’s a highly controversial move: Detractors decry that offering easy access to such sophisticated AI could trigger development of AI tools that could ultimately threaten humankind worldwide.
Observes Ghaffary: “Some technologists are increasingly worried about hypothetical doomsday scenarios in which an AI could outsmart human beings to inflict harm like releasing a biological super weapon — or causing other havoc in ways we can’t fully imagine.”
Bottom line: This Vox piece offers a thoughtful look at how today’s decisions by AI researchers appear destined to impact the future in world-changing, monumental ways.
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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.