by Joe Dysart, editor, RobotWritersAI.com | Jan. 15, 2020
Twenty Twenty will continue to see an embrace of AI-generated writing by virtually every major industry.
Increasing numbers of news outlets will continue to boldly experiment with the tools — as will advertisers and public relations pros.
More individual businesses will also grab the technology to auto-write company reports based on info from their databases.
And AI personalization – the ability to generate highly customized news and other writing based on what smartphone readers are tapping, swiping and commenting on as they interact with text – will continue to crop-up in a number of implementations.
But the tech will also inspire its fair share of controversy.
Many writers — especially journalists and copywriters — will continue to view AI as synonymous with job loss.
And media watchers will continue to sound the alarm as free AI software capable of generating fake news will continue to be released to the general public.
All told, scores of trends will impact the spread of AI-generated writing across the globe.
Here are the 10 that will make the greatest impact:
*Newsrooms Will Continue to Eagerly Embrace AI-Generated Writing: Early successes with AI at major news outlets like The New York Times, the LA Times and Bloomberg will continue to spawn AI implementations in newsrooms worldwide.
China Science News, for example, is already auto-generating science news based on article abstracts it finds in major scientific journals.
The Canadian Press brought in AI last year to automatically create instant background stories on specific electoral districts.
And the Houston Chronicle tapped AI news service Hoodline to auto-generate stories about high school sports, business openings and closings and weather.
Still other implementations representative of the spread of AI-generated news across the globe include:
*The Professional Golfers Association’s use of AI to auto-generate 900+ golf stories every week
*United Robots’ deal to provide AI tools
for Schibsted Media Group
*The BBC’s use of AI writing to generate 100 + stories every
month – each hyper-localized for a specific community
*More Writers Will Grow Fearful That AI May Spell Job Loss: Despite repeated assurances from publishers, many writers fear the AI looming in their doorways will be followed by pink slips.
Those concerns are reinforced by a new academic study, which found artificial intelligence generated writing and similar tools are currently being used to completely eliminate the jobs of human journalists at select news outlets.
Meanwhile, Mar Masson Mack, a writer at The Next Web, has expressed his unease over his AI robot ‘colleague.’ It works alongside him, relentlessly punching out high-quality copy — sans fatigue.
And media futurist Hossein Derakhsahn predicts that AI-generated writing and similar tools spell extinction for most newsroom jobs.
“The AI capture of newsrooms will kill more jobs than we can imagine,” Derakhsahn adds. “It will also kill many newsrooms who can’t afford to invest in AI technologies to lower their costs in order to survive.”
Overall writer anxiety about AI is best summarized by Thomas Kent, a journalism professor at Columbia University: “AI isn’t sentimental, and it isn’t ideological. It can be used for good or for evil. It can be used to replace journalists or to strengthen journalists.”
Adds Kent: “It’s a neutral piece of technology that can be adapted for almost anything.”
*Publishers Will Continue to Assure Writers That AI is an Aid –Not a Job Killer: Keenly aware that many writers gulp at the prospect of AI-generated writing, publishers will continue to release a flurry of articles in 2020 reassuring scribes that AI is their friend.
According to Nick Diakopoulos, for example, some estimates suggest that current levels of AI technology could automate only about 15% of a reporter’s job.
Diakopoulos is assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, Northwestern University.
Diakopoulos also says only 9% of an editor’s job can most likely be automated.
Plus, Diakopoulos also finds that more often than not, AI technologies appear to be creating new types of work in journalism — rather than eliminating jobs.
That sentiment is echoed by Molly Prosser, associate creative director at eBay. Prosser helped implement AI-generated writing of email subject heads at eBay.
“The hours I’ve spent editing and having team members pour over these things — it’s just meaningless work when we have a piece of AI that can do that for us,” Prosser says.
Still other stories assuring writers that they’re safe from AI appeared in a major study released by the Media Policy Project, in the Indian Journalism Review and on Customer Think .
*AI Will Be Increasingly Used to Personalize Writing: AI has a unique ability to assess just what you’re looking to read – and deliver it to you, time and again.
News outlets have been among the first to capitalize on this advantage and will continue to look for ways to combine AI tools with news personalization.
“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,” says Jill Nicholson.
She’s head of product education at Chartbeat, a content analytics firm, who was quoted in a major analysis of AI’s use in the newsroom released by the European Broadcasters Union.
Meanwhile, eNewsletter service Rasa.io says its using AI to personalize newsletters by first crawling the Web for content from hundreds of news sources.
Subsequently, it auto-populates enewsletters with the select articles it finds, based on the reading preferences of the individual newsletter recipient.
But one of the most experienced of AI personalizers to watch in 2020 is UK news service Radar.
It announced in last September that it had personalized 200,000 stories for readers across Britain. Its plans for 2020 is to continue cranking out thousands of hyper-personalized news stories each month.
Even so, scholar Sophia Ignatidou warns that mainstream media’s new penchant for personalized news could undermine democracies.
“Telling audiences what they want – or expect – to hear is markedly different from telling them what they need to hear,” Ignatidou observes.
*More Company Reports Will Write Themselves: The same AI software newspapers are using to auto-generate stories will also be used by increasing numbers of firms in 2020 to generate customized reports for businesses.
Essentially, these AI-generated writing solutions can drill-down into organization databases and auto-produce easy-to-understand, written reports based on that business data.
Anna Schena, for example, says her company’s AI solution is already bringing business databases to life with auto-generated, written reports.
And Sharon Daniels, CEO at Arria NLG — another AI-generated writing toolmaker — adds that businesses can also look forward to Alexa-like, voice reports from their company databases.
For a deeper look into the trend, check out “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.
*More Advertisers Will Use AI for Short Snippets of Copy: While it appears AI still needs additional development before it can produce long-form, highly creative copy, more advertisers will use the tech in 2020 to generate short snippets of advertising text.
Chase Bank, for example, turned-heads last summer after it announced it was all-in on short ad slogans generated by artificial intelligence.
The bank inked a five-year deal with AI toolmaker Persado to create short ad slogans for its credit card and mortgage businesses.
Meanwhile, Textio – which specializes in creating job ads generated by AI – was recognized by CNBC as one of 50 private companies in 2019 “whose innovations are changing the world.”
And health insurer Humana is leveraging AI to enhance its email marketing.
Humana found that 31% of recipients opened an email it sent that sported a subject head created by AI.
That performance was 10% better than an email sent using a subject head created by a human.
*Academic Publishing Will Continue to Expand Its Use of AI-Generated Writing Tools: Beyond the media spotlight, academic publishers have been quietly onboarding robot writing tools for years, according to Publisher’s Weekly.
“Today, close to 80% of all our journal-content processing—from editorial services to final delivery—pass through various Integra products that are built on natural language processing and RPA (robotic process automation) frameworks,” says Sriram Subramanya, CEO, Integra Software Services.
Meanwhile, academic publisher Springer Nature has already released a prototype academic book written by AI. It’s currently working to fine-tune AI bookwriting.
*Public Relations Will Need to Up-Its- Game With AI in 2020: While AI has made inroads in PR, too many PR firms are hanging back from the technology, according to Anne Gregory.
She’s a professor of corporate communications at University of Huddersfield.
“Other professions have already done major work on the shape of their future workforce — reviewing education and training, looking at their future role in organizations and society and at the ethics of AI,” Gregory observes.
“We need to get cracking, and get on with some serious work in all these areas.”
A study detailing — in part — public relations’ slow adaptation of AI, is due out in early 2020.
*Journalism Students Will Sorely Need AI Training: Given that AI appears destined to remake the face of journalism, j-students need to arrive at newsrooms with AI skills in tow, according to some journalism educators.
“We need to think about educational models to up these different literacies for journalists,” says Nick Diakopoulos. “We might imagine a doctorate of professional practice for computational journalism.”
Diakopoulos is assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, Northwestern University.
Jack Lule, chair, department of journalism and communication at Lehigh University, agrees: “We want to prepare students to not only be able to report on the transformations being wrought by AI, but also equip them to help shape its future for both society-at-large and the field of journalism.”
Cardiff University has already heeded this advice. Its students will be able to take master classes in AI journalism tools beginning February 2020.
“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.
Apparently, many in the student population are getting the word. Last fall, nearly 13,000 students from across the globe signed-up for a course in data journalism offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
“We were stunned at the enthusiasm for the course,” says Simon Rogers, one of the course instructors and data editor on Google’s News Lab Team.
The six-week stint took students from 160 countries through “the entire pipeline of producing a data story,” Rogers says.
One of the most widely known applications of data journalism is the AI-generation of vivid graphs and other illustrations from info databases.
But data journalism also refers to the AI-generation of articles from databases.
*Fake News Generators Will Continue to Trigger a Flurry of Concern: Fake news generators like GPT-2 and Grover – first released in 2019 – will continue to trigger widespread uproar in the media world.
Many worry that in 2020, such generators could easily spam fake news across social media and the Web – making it nearly impossible to discern what is real from what is propaganda.
“At the moment, the law has little to say about any of this,” says John Naughton.
He’s professor of the public understanding of technology at Open University. And he’s author of “From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.”
“We’re currently at the same stage as we were when governments first started thinking about regulating medicinal drugs,” Naughton adds.
Major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are so concerned about fake news, the’ve made plans to work together in 2020 to develop tools to fight the scourge.
“The ability to create synthetic or manipulated content that is difficult to discern from real events frames the urgent need for developing new capabilities for detecting such content,” observes Terah Lyons, executive director, The Partnership on AI.
But other media watchers warn that fear over fake news tech in 2020 — at least fake news generators like GPT-2 — may be overblown.
For example: Joshua Benton, director, Nieman Journalism Lab, sees the perceived threat of GPT-2 as more of a yawn.
*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.