A writer for The New Yorker muses on the impact of writing generated by artificial intelligence — and how surprisingly powerful it can be.
Specifically, he takes a look at Google Smart Compose and similar predictive text tools driven by AI.
His experience with Smart Compose — which auto-completes sentences you write when using Google email — was particularly eye-opening.
“Perhaps because writing is my vocation, I am inclined to consider my sentences, even in a humble email, in some way a personal expression of my original thought,” author John Seabrook observes about his experience with Smart Compose.
“It was therefore disconcerting how frequently the AI was able to accurately predict my intentions, often when I was in mid-sentence, or even earlier.
“Sometimes, the machine seemed to have a better idea than I did.”
Bottom line: This article in The New Yorker is an extremely in-depth, high quality read.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*AI Tools Inspiring a Fresh Take on Journalism: Introducing AI-generated writing to the newsroom often triggers journalists to re-examine what they do, how they do it and why they do it, according to Soren Karlsson.
Karlsson is CEO of United Robots, an AI-generated writing solutions provider that has been outfitting publishers with AI during the past four years.
The “process often acts as a catalyst for a healthy newsroom discussion around how and why its journalism is created,” Karlsson observes.
“The positive outcome is not just the automatically generated content, but also a deeper understanding among journalists of how the work is done and why,” Karlsson adds. “The process creates a new level of ownership — of the language, the values, the dos and don’ts.”
*New SEO Tools Optimize AI-Generated Writing: In one of the newest twists on AI-generated writing, software developers are adding SEO-optimization to the mix.
Essentially, these tools ensure the AI editing and writing tools you’re using are also optimizing your content for the search engines.
SEO-optimized copy ensures your Web site or other digital property can rank as high as possible in search engine returns.
The tools profiled in this article are Ink, Grammarly, SEO Writing Assistant, Pro Writing Aid, WordAi and AI Writer.
*AI-Generated Writing Meets Ethics: The increasing use of automated writing in journalism has triggered concerns the tech could step-on commonly accepted norms.
“Some of the main issues, I think, relate to uncertainty around the accuracy of evidence produced by AI systems, as well as the labeling of automation to ensure that end
Diakopoulos is an assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University.
“Another issue is the quality of data that is fed into AI systems,” Diakopoulos adds. “It’s well understood that if biased data is fed into a machine learning system, the system will learn those biases.
Diakopoulos also explores other ethical implications of AI-generated writing in this article along with Idoia Ana Salazar García. She’s a professor at San Pablo CEU University specializing in the ethics of artificial intelligence.
*A Primer on AI-Generated Writing in Marketing: Tech Target has released a brief handbook detailing how AI-generated writing and similar tools can be used to auto-generate — and auto personalize — marketing content.
“This handbook explores how a pantheon of AI technologies — from machine learning and natural language processing to image recognition and video search — promises to revolutionize content management,” observes co-author Linda Tucci.
*A Quick Look at Automated Copywriting: Nathaniel Dangpan, CIO, Kepler Group, offers a quick glimpse at how AI-generated writing and similar tools are changing copywriting.
“Some recent emerging case studies and trends suggest there are a few more AI marketing use cases that are migrating from being just hypothetically promising to delivering actual results for companies,” Kangpan observes.
*AI Editing Tool Snags $90 Million in New Funding: Grammarly, an advanced editing tool that helps writers with grammar, spelling, writing tone and SEO optimization, has scooped-up $90 million in new funding.
“Grammarly is solving real challenges that people face every time they pick up a device to answer a text, answer a work email or cold email a potential client,” says Hemant Taneja.
He’s managing director at General Catalyst, the investment firm that squired the new round of Grammarly’s funding.
“While there are large companies attempting to innovate in this space, creating intuitive AI that complements our natural communication abilities isn’t their primary focus,” Taneja says.
“It’s not even their third, fourth or 20th focus,” Taneja adds. “For Grammarly, helping people communicate more effectively is their sole goal. And that’s why, despite any competition, they’ve got more than 20 million daily active users.”
*Worker Pay Stagnation: Automation to Blame?: Some economists theorize that automation is quashing workers’ ability to push for higher wages, according to author Aimee Picchi.
Key indicators:
Dishearteningly, workers’ wages have resisted a proportionate upswing.
“The steady decline in the relative prices of robots and automation equipment over the past few decades have made it increasingly profitable to automate,” observe economists Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu.
“In this environment, workers may be reluctant to ask for significant pay raises out of fear that an employer will replace their jobs with robots.”
*Significant Growth Ahead in AI-Driven Content Marketing: IT Intelligence Markets predicts the use of AI content marketing tools – including AI-generated marketing – will spike significantly through 2026.
“This market report is a thorough analysis of the existing situation and the anticipated condition for Global Artificial Intelligence in Content Marketing Market,” the report writers observe.
AI-Generated Sports Writing: How They Do It: New academic research reveals software offering AI-generated sports news tends to follow the same format.
Essentially, the AI tools use a master sports story template, which retrieves data about a particular game to fill-in-the-blanks about a sporting event.
This template approach is similar – but more sophisticated – to the templates that have been used by mail-merge programs for decades.
Such software packages are often used by email marketers to create templates for marketing pitches.
Email marketers use templates to pitch a new product, for example, by auto-populating each marketing email they send with personalizing data such as customer name, location, number of years as a customer, shopping history with the business and the like.
With AI-generated sports stories, segment one of a sports story template begins with coverage of an event by auto-importing data on the overall result of a game — including score stats.
In segment two, the template is populated with data detailing what happened in the first half of the game — including data on particular goals, hits, touchdowns, etc.
In segment three, the template brings in other data about any player substitutions that were made during the game. And it also imports data on errors, penalties, player ejections from the game and similar statistics.
In segment four, the template auto-imports data reflecting both teams’ new standings in their division or similar, along with info on which teams the competitors play next.
Finally, to avoid appearing repetitive, the AI software varies word and phrase choices used in each article as it churns out story-after-story using the same formula.
“Repetitions in structure compensate with variations in the writing,” the researchers observe. Such variation is critical to AI-generated sports stories, which often appear side-by-side on Web pages or in printed newspapers and magazines, according to researchers.
*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.