You can’t blame Microsoft for grinning ear-to-ear: Its profits are up 33% for Q4, 2023 — a clear sign that it’s getting a significant bump from its investment in AI.

Observes Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft: “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale.

“By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we’re winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains across every sector.”

Microsoft’s most famous bet on AI was to generously fund ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — when the startup was little more than a glimmer in an AI researcher’s eye.

Not a bad call.

In other AI-generated writing news and analysis:

*In-Depth Guide: Prompt Perfect and More: For Writers Who Fear the Blank Page: Writer Aaron Drapkin offers his take in this piece on the top 11 custom versions of ChatGPT that you can find at the ChatGPT store.

ChatGPT customizations of special interest to writers include:

~Prompt Perfect, a tool for optimizing the prompts you use with ChatGPT and similar chatbots

~Consensus, a search tool used for academic papers

~Image Generator, a tool writers can use to auto-generate supporting images for their copy

*Microsoft’s Copilot Pro: More Yawn Than Dawn: Early reviews of Copilot Pro — a kind of ChatGPT embedded in the Microsoft software suite — have been lackluster.

Observes writer Richard Speed: “A glance at social media shows many are decidedly underwhelmed by the Pro experience as complaints about performance begin to mount-up.”

Others worry that Microsoft’s heavy focus on AI may be slowing other improvements to the Microsoft suite — although some insist that Copilot is ‘transformative,’ according to Speed.

*SparkyAI: Outsource Your Marketing to An Algorithm, Impress Your Robot Boss!: Marketers looking for an AI content generator that was trained especially for the industry and includes enhanced tools like audience psychographics may want to take a look at SparkyAI.

Sparky’s promise: Just feed your personas, products and campaign objectives into the Brain Bank and SparkyAI’s advanced algorithm will deliver on-brand, human-sounding copy in seconds.

Bonus: Each output can be customized across all digital channels with a single click.

*Too Cool for Dating?: Here’s a New Way to “Phone-It-In:” People too ‘been there, done that’ to show up for a first date can now turn to Volar.

It’s an AI chatbot you train with your personal data and your personal conversational style that you send out on ‘first dates’ for you — which meets up with similarly trained chatbots from potential romantic partners.

All we need now is another chatbot that can also go on all your dates for you, get married, have kids, retire in style and then send you a complete zip file on your incredible life.

*Literary Genius or Keyboard Supervisor?: Award Winning Novelist Helped by AI: Award-winning, sc-fi novelist Shen Yang says he got there — in part — by relying on AI.

Yang plans to detail how he used the tech to help write his novel.

Observes Yan: Anyone can “create good fiction with AI.”

*Quick Study for ChatGPT Newbies: Those just arriving to the ChatGPT party can get a quick study on what all the fuss is about with this piece by writer Stephen Shankland.

Observes Shankland: “Meant to be just a research project, ChatGPT instead swept us away with its mind-blowing skills.

“Now you can even get custom AI apps.”

*AI and the Law: More From Thomson Reuters: Legal juggernaut Thomson Reuters has rolled-out new generative AI tools for attorneys — Ask Practical Law AI and Practical Law Finder.

Both are essentially Q&A helpers that lawyers can use for legal research.

Answers take about 30 seconds to generate.

And users can also pepper the tools with up to seven follow-up questions, according to Erica Kitaev, a vice president at Thomson Reuters.

*AI’s Gift: Masterclass in Mediocre? Concerns that automated writing tools would flood the Web and social media with mediocre writing, images and similar content appear to be well-warranted, according to writer Cecily Mauran.

Observes Mauran: “If you’re thinking, ‘the Internet already contains a bunch of useless garbage,’ that’s true, but this is different.

“Think about it this way: The first version of ChatGPT was the last model to be trained on entirely human-generated content.

“Every model since then contains training data that has AI-generated content — which is difficult to verify, or even track.

“This becomes unreliable — or to put it bluntly, garbage, data.”

*AI Big Picture: AI’s Doomsday: Just Four Board-Members Stand Between Us and the Apocalypse?: Will Hurd — a former board-member at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — shudders at his take that a handful of board-members at the OpenAI essentially control what will most likely evolve into AI’s answer to a nuclear bomb.

Observes Hurd: “As this technology becomes more science fact than science fiction, its governance can’t be left to the whims of a few people.

“Like the nuclear arms race, there are bad actors — including our adversaries — moving forward without ethical or human considerations.

“This moment is not just about a company’s internal politics: It’s a call-to-action to ensure guardrails are put in place to ensure AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a force for good — rather than the harbinger of catastrophic consequences.”

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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.