AI-generated writing is enabling publishers to offer news coverage to news deserts — small communities that have been abandoned by traditional journalism – or never covered before, according to Journalism.co.uk.
By automating the writing of editorial from big data sets, there is no limit to the volume of articles a newsrooms can publish, says Cecilia Campbell, product and market officer, United Robots – an AI-generated writing toolmaker.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Company Reports That Write Themselves – An In-Depth Look: Arria NLG — an AI-generated writing toolmaker — has released an excellent report on how AI-generated writing can be used to auto-create company reports from internal data.
Essentially, tools like Arria NLG can now generate text narratives from data stored in popular business intelligence dashboards like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, MicroStrategy and Qlik. Look for “Natural Language Generation for BI (business intelligence)” on the Arria whitepapers download page.
*A Marketing Blog Completely Driven by Artificial Intelligence: Marketing agency Fractl has created a faux marketing blog using commonly available AI tools.
Text was generated by Grover, an open source AI-generated writing tool. And images were whipped-up with StyleGAN, an AI image maker.
While the writing would never make it past a skilled editor, the faux blog nevertheless illustrates what appears inevitable in coming years: News, marketing and other Web sites entirely designed, authored and maintained by AI machines.
*Free AI Fake News Generator Continues to Turn Heads: Journalists continue to worry over the implications of Grover, an AI-generated writing tool created by researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
“What’s terrifying about Grover is its dead-simple to use and manages to produce enough intelligible material to make it feel just a generation or two away from being indistinguishable from real writing,” observes Tristan Greene, a writer for The Next Web.
Especially disturbing, Greene observes, is the app’s ability to mimic writing styles – including her own. “It’s a very unsettling feeling to see my personal writing nuances vomited on screen by a mindless machine,” Greene observes. You can give Grover a whirl yourself at its Web site.
*Quality, AI-Generated Novels — Only a Matter of Time: Already established as a tool for writing simple prose, AI-generated writing is poised to start churning out engaging novels, according to Bjorn Schuller, associate professor, machine learning, Imperial College of London.
AI is already coming up with jokes and poems and can also come up with intriguing plot lines, Schuller notes in this 3-minute video.
Human novelists still have a cushion of time, though. Schuller predicts the first quality novel generated by AI is probably still a decade or two away.
*AI Remaking the Job of the Journalist: AI-enabled journalism will still offer jobs for writers — but not the same ones, according to Nick Diakopoulos, assistant professor, communication studies and computer science, Northwestern University.
“Human work will be hybridized – blended together with algorithms – to suit AI’s capabilities and accommodate its limitations,” Diakopoulos observes.
*A Torrent of Spam Articles from AI-Generated WritingTools?: Commonly available tools like GPT2 — a free and open source AI-generated writing tool – could be used to churn out limitless numbers of spam articles by Web site owners looking to boost their search engine rankings.
Essentially, the tools could be used to continually rewrite the same information, tricking search engines like Google into identifying the content as new a notable.
“It seems unlikely that Google will be able to fully solve the problem of high-quality, algorithmically-created content,” observes Kristin Tynski, co-founder, Fractl, a marketing firm.
*AI Background Critical for Today’s Journalism Students: Future journalists will need a deep understanding AI to ensure they can thrive amidst the AI-generated writing tools increasingly populating modern newsrooms, according to Jack Lule, chair, department of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
Essentially, journalism students must learn how to “adapt to and shape AI,” Lule says.
*A Writer Frets Over AI-Generated Writing: “I have always been a firm believer in human creativity and originality,” observes Muhammad Mustafa Monowar, who studies philosophy of mind and cognitive science the University of Birmingham. “But seeing new inventions like these sometimes casts doubt on such beliefs.”
–Joe Dysart is 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.