Category Archives: AI Writing This Week

Another AI Sports News Service Gears for Launch

AI sports news provider Sportlogiq is ramping up to auto-write private, internal reports for 30 NHL teams and 74 pro sports teams, according to Forbes.

The service will also use sports data about those teams to auto-generate news stories for five major broadcast networks.

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“These AI-driven insights, gathered from their proprietary datasets, will provide exclusive information on underlying team performance, trends, and systems to help teams win more games,” observes Forbes writer Todd Karpovich.

Meanwhile, the breaking news stories generated by Sportlogiq will offer major broadcasting networks entertaining content for viewers, Karpovich adds.

Sportlogiq is backed by funding from Mark Cuban, owner, Dallas Mavericks, according to Karpovich.

AI-generated writing for the service is provided by Arria.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*AI Writing Assistants Dramatically Improving Student Writing, Says Word Guru: AI writing assistants are dramatically improving the writing of high school students, according to Jason Toncic, a high school English teacher doing his doctoral research on AI-augmented writing.

“I have witnessed firsthand the drastic difference that a modern grammar checker can make on students’ drafts,” Toncic observes.

“Freshmen — who had until recently been on the receiving end of a salvo of corrective marks — are now submitting clean copy as first drafts.

“Powered by the latest developments in Natural Language Understanding — a branch of AI research that focuses on machine reading comprehension — the accuracy of the latest generation of grammar checkers is astonishing.”

*AI Journalism Researchers Looking to Prototype AI News Tools: Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science are looking to prototype new AI tools that solve real world problems for news outlets.

“We are asking media organizations across the world to let us know what are the challenges they think our collaborative initiative should focus on,” observes Charlie Beckett.

Beckett is director of the Media Policy Project at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the driving force behind the group looking to prototype the AI tools — JournalismAI.

He’s also author of the study, “New Powers, New Responsibilities: A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence,” released last fall.

Ultimately, JournalismAI plans to cherry pick a few challenges news outlets send its way and then develop AI tools to solve those problems, according to Beckett.

*AI-Generated Writing Finds Champions Among Swedish Journalists: After working for five years to integrate AI-generated writing at Swedish news outlets, United Robots says feedback from journalists on its automated writing system has been positive.

The reason: “The robots take care of the repetitive tasks,” observes Cecilia Campbell, chief marketing officer, United Robots.

“I don’t see news robots as a threat to journalism,” says Markus Isacson, a sports reporter at Västerbottens-Kuriren — a Swedish newspaper that uses United Robots’ AI-generated writing system.

“Right now, they give journalists time to develop better journalism,” Isacson adds. “It allows us to spend more time doing what we’re best at — and less time doing basic reporting.”

Jennifer Engström, a journalist at Mittmedia, agrees: “If we can save time, effort and money by having a robot doing ‘simple’ journalism, that’s worth a lot more than having a reporter spend evenings/weekends calling in match results.

“This means we’ll live longer as a media company — and I’ll keep my job longer.”

Initially designed to provide quick, short stories drawn from databases, United Robots’ AI writing system has since evolved to include auto-interviews with sports coaches.

Dubbed “Q & A,” the interviewing feature auto-texts relevant questions to team coaches right after sports matches end.

That coach feedback is automatically inserted into the relevant sports stories generated by United Robots’ AI-generated writing system.

Since 2018, United Robots has conducted automated interviews with 602 coaches using its Q&A feature, according to United Robots’ blog.

All told, 6,272 quotes on game results have been mined from those interviews and published on approximately 30 Swedish news sites, according to the United Robots blog.

*The First AI-Generated Novel?: Maybe Never: In this 26-minute podcast, Dr. Selmer Bringsjord, director, Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Laboratory, offers his take on when – if ever – AI will generate a substantial novel.

Bringsjord’s over-arching conclusion: AI will never write creative prose.

*AI-Generated Writing Firm Offers Coronavirus Updates: Narrative Science is offering regular updates on the Coronavirus pandemic — with an emphasis on hard facts.

“We knew the power of our technology and saw it as our responsibility to help in any way we could,” says Stuart Frankel, CEO, Narrative Science – a leader in AI-generated writing tech.

“That’s how we came to the decision to create free stories with the most up-to-date COVID-19 data available,” Frankel says. “We hope these stories bring wider understanding — and in the future — bring some peace when we begin to see a decline” in the Coronavirus scourge.

*Auto Job Ad Writer Adds Alerts for Ageism and Discrimination Against the Disabled: Textio, an AI-text writer that auto-writes job ads fostering workplace diversity, now also protects against inadvertent ageism and discrimination of the disabled.

“When you proactively speak to your accessible workplace and inclusive culture — all candidates — not just those who’ve been marginalized historically, benefit,” observes Katie McCormick, product manager, Textio.

“Textio is helping writers use conscious, intentional language, so that they can take active steps toward building an inclusive culture,” McCormick adds.

*IBM Watson Is Enhanced With AI-Language Tools: IBM is beefing-up its famous AI-powered Watson technology with tools developed under an initiative dubbed ‘Project Debater.’

Project Debater is a software program designed to auto-generate one side of a debate on virtually any topic.

For businesses and organizations, the tool is good for critically evaluating ideas, new strategies and other concepts.

One of the significant AI tools IBM is lifting from Project Debater for use with Watson is ‘Summarization.”

It’s an application that can summarize data on a specific topic, drawn from a wide variety of sources.

For example: ‘Summarization’ was leveraged by The Grammys earlier this year to analyze more than 18 million articles, blogs and bios featuring info on Grammy artists and celebrities.

The resulting info-snippets from Summarization were woven into a live-stream of the Grammys’ red carpet event, on-demand videos of the Grammys and photos on the Grammys’ Web site.

Meanwhile, Project Debater has yielded another AI tool for Watson: Advanced Topic Clustering.

It’s designed to enable users to cluster incoming data into meaningful topics of related information – and then analyze that data.

The tool also enables users to render its results in the language and jargon used by a specific business or industry.

*AI’s Impact on Journalism — in 45 Slides: Francesco Marconi has put together an extremely in-depth look at how AI is transforming journalism.

A longtime player in AI-generated news, Marconi helped spearhead AI implementations at The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.

His new slides tell the story of how AI is changing journalism by showcasing 45 micro case studies – all of which you can flip through in just a few minutes.

Marconi is also author of the new book, “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism.”

And he leads a new AI-generated writing and AI news tool company, Applied XLabs.

The startup – which is partnering with the Boston Globe — is promising to develop AI tools that will auto-analyze news databases to serve-up story ideas, insights and other news content.

*Grad Student Uses Neural Network to Write College Paper: An anonymous grad student says he was able to use GPT-2 – a well known free AI text generator – to auto-write a paper for his business administration class.

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No head-turner in terms of style or brilliance, the paper nevertheless scored a passing grade.

But that rating was more a reflection of the overly forgiving writing standards prevalent at business grad schools, according to wily the student.

“I think it’s hard to get across to people who didn’t study in business school how poor the standards are for essays that are turned in,” the student observes.

“I think the professors are too proud to think of the possibility of AI writing an essay,” he adds. “But it was really easy to do.”

*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves

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Grammarly
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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.

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