While the jury’s out on AI-generated writing as major job-killer, this much is clear: Moving forward, writers will need to serve-up their best stuff, according to Ross Dawson.
He’s a futurist and founding chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies Group.
“Many people currently earning money from writing will need to lift their game,” Dawson observes. “This is most obvious for those who write primarily for search engine optimization.
“Yet there are plenty of others who will need to do better to keep ahead of the machines.”
As evidence, Dawson offers an article – which he published along with his post – that was auto-generated by Grover, a free fake news generator.
For raw material, Grover only needed an article title and link to Dawson’s Web site to start writing.
The result: An article that works.
Granted, the piece won’t win any awards for writing style or innovative insights.
But the article by the AI software is lucidly written, comes off as seemingly factual and remains true to its own, inner logic.
In a phrase, it’s a piece that could be judged by some as “good enough.”
And that’s what disturbs many writers.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*AI Personalized News — Poised to Proliferate: The same genre of AI algorithms auto-personalizing our music choices on Spotify and recommending our movie selections on Netflix is coming to a news outlet near you.
AI-driven personalized news – computerization that picks stories for specific audiences and writes articles for a specific reader – is reshaping the news industry, according to a new report from the European Broadcasting Union.
“Audiences all have their own personalities and preferences,” says Jill Nicholson, head of product education at Chartbeat, a content analytics firm.
“I think it’s going to be a crucial skill for every newsroom to stay up-to-date with those individual reader behaviors, and really learn from them,” she says.
Nick Diakopoulos — an assistant professor in communication studies at Northwestern University who is also quoted in the report — agrees.
“The data overwhelmingly show that personalization does increase engagement and increase audience size and loyalty,” Diakopoulos says.
“It does all of the things that perhaps we wish it wouldn’t do — but it does.”
*AI News Personalization: Jeopardizing Democratic Societies?: Researcher Sophia Ignatidou warns that mainstream media’s new penchant for personalized news could undermine democracies.
In a phrase, personalized news recommendation/creation systems have deep political effects. And the decision criteria embodied in their systems have profound political consequences for democracy, according to Ignatidou .
Ignatidou is a research fellow at the Academy Stavros Niarchos Foundation. She specializes in AI, disinformation, political campaigning, propaganda and surveillance.
“Telling audiences what they want – or expect – to hear is markedly different from telling them what they need to hear,” Ignatidou observes.
“Positioning audiences’ preferences at the center of the journalistic endeavor — and thereby jeopardizing the autonomy of journalists — could diminish the latter’s ability to serve the public interest,” she adds.
Ignatidou examines news personalization’s threat to democracy – along with related issues – in her new paper, ” AI-driven Personalization in Digital Media: Political and Societal Implications.”
*Newsrooms on the Hunt for AI Skills: 43% of journalism execs say they are actively looking for news staff with AI skills, according to a new report.
Plus, a full 44% of those surveyed say the coming proliferation of AI automated writing in newsrooms has triggered the need for university-level AI training, education and literacy.
“The biggest future wish from respondents was for general education — and specific training for AI,” observes Charlie Beckett.
He’s director of the Media Policy Project, the research group that undertook the study with financing help from the Google News Initiative.
“Literacy was seen as vital throughout the news organization to change culture and improve understanding of new tools and systems,” Beckett adds. “Explaining and demystifying AI was seen as a way to get others to use it.”
*Cardiff Prepping Students For AI Newsrooms: Students taking master classes in journalism at Cardiff beginning February 2020 will be getting hands-on training with AI tools.
“There are traditional print journalists who think, ‘That’s not for me, I don’t need to think about AI’,” says Gavin Allen, a lecturer at Cardiff’s school of journalism.
“But it is becoming widely used at publications,” Allen adds. “AI is not the future — it is happening right now.
“We need to be aiming to ‘future proof’ our students by looking at programs already in use, while teaching them critical thinking skills so they can fit those new roles — rather than just filling the role of reporter.”
*Study Finds Readers Trust Human Reporting More Than AI Reporting: New research from the University of Florida indicates readers put more trust in articles with a human byline – compared to reports signed by a robot.
Specifically, the study found that readers judged a piece signed by “Kelly Richards, Reporter,” more credible than the same, exact article signed by “Automated Insights, Robot Reporter.”
“Entities that are perceived as less human-like are less likely to be perceived as capable of completing human tasks,” observes Frank Waddell.
He authored the research and is an assistant journalism professor at the University of Florida.
Waddell’s study contradicts similar new research from the University of Miami.
That study found that news stories and sports stories generated by artificial intelligence are deemed more credible to readers than the same stories written by human journalists.
The Miami research also found that AI-generated articles on politics were also found more credible than human-written politics coverage.
Human writers did score a win with financial news stories in the Miami study: Readers found those stories more believable when written by traditional, flesh-and-blood scribes.
*Coming Clean: Should News Outlets Identify Stories Written by AI?: Given that AI appears ready to pervade journalism, it’s time to demand publishers identify AI-generated stories, says Brendan Dixon.
He’s a fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence.
“When I read a piece created by another human, I am engaging with another mind,” Dixon observes. “When I read a piece ‘authored’ by an AI, however, I’m engaging an algorithm.
“The human may ponder, evaluate, weigh, and rewrite – I sure do.
“An AI spews.
“We should support — by subscribing and sharing — those media outlets that have clear bylines and dig deep into their sources,” Dixon observes. “As long as I know the source, I can make up my mind about the content.”
*New Non-Fiction Book Features a Chapter By AI: A new tome, “The Tech Whisperer” — chronicling the world’s increasing digitalization — features a chapter by written by AI software.
The AI’s ironic focus: An examination of the pros and cons of artificial intelligence’s unfolding impact on the world.
“On the surface, it is hard to tell if an AI or a human being wrote the chapter, because the writing combines logic, facts, and structure,” observes author Sravasti Datta.
“On in-depth reading — which was done to nitpick, to support the argument that AI can never replace humans — what was found wanting was a person’s humane, conversational voice and descriptive style that makes a piece of writing a joy to read.
“The chapter was packed with facts,” Datta adds. “But is that enough to make it worth a read? That is a subjective question.”
*AI Novel Writing: Still a Ways to Go: Recent forays into AI-rendered long-form fiction have pretty much yielded dreck, according to Wired.
“GPT-2 can’t write a novel — not even the semblance — if you’re thinking Austen or Franzen,” observes Wired writer Gregory Barber, referring to a free AI-driven text generator.
“It can barely get out a sentence before losing the thread.”
Even so, writers and techies continue to poke-and-prod the underlying code behind ineffective AI fiction writing tools, hoping to coax a cyber-phoenix from the detritus.
*AI-Generated Sci-Fi Bookstore Pops-Up: While the ability to write long-form fiction still eludes AI, creative coder Andreaas Refsgaard still toys with the media.
Currently, he has an online bookstore, which sells what he forgivingly calls AI-generated ‘novels.’
The books — generated by his use of AI software — are not real novels, of course.
But they are a marker pointing to where Refsgaard hopes AI fiction-writing will evolve.
“In BooksBy.AI, none of the texts, titles, descriptions, and reviews of the books are written by humans,” Refsgaard says. “Even the book covers and the reviewers’ faces were created by AI.
“For us, it wasn’t about making the best book written by AI,” Refsgaard says. “It was about testing what was possible.”
*Found on Twitter:
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*Also on RobotWritersAI.com — Evergreen Article:
*AI-Created Newsletters: On The Cheap
–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.