New research from Meta AI finds that AI is very good at creating convincing arguments and winning people over to its point-of-view — the very ingredients needed for any winning opinion piece you’d find in top newspapers.
Specifically, researchers were able to create a virtual player for Diplomacy — a highly sophisticated board game that requires participants to use arguments, cajoling, deal-making and all manner of other persuasion — to jockey for position during a time of war.
The result: The virtual player for Diplomacy “outperformed human players on average and placed in the top 10 percent of players who took part in multiple games,” according to Khushboo Gupta, a writer for MarkTechPost.
Adds Gupta: “To win the game, the agent must, like humans, be able to spot bluffing and communicate like a genuine person, develop relationships, and display empathy and game-related expertise.”
Granted, AI has already proved that it can auto-generate satisfactory opinion pieces with the help of human editing.
But this new research elevates AI’s ability to change hearts-and-minds.
All that’s left is for a brilliant programmer to forge an AI writing app incorporating this new research from Meta AI.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*In-Depth Guide: Creaitor AI: LearnWire gives this AI writer a thumbs-up for being able to auto-generate high-quality writing.
On the downside, LearnWire wishes Creaitor AI had a more efficient interface that would cut down on the need to cut-and-paste so much.
Creaitor AI currently costs $59/month to auto-generate an unlimited number of words.
*Another Automated Writing / Art Content Suite is Born: Add Tome — a storytelling app for business and other presentations — to the list of writing apps that are adding automated art generation to their suites.
Specifically, Tome announced it now features an automatic text-to-art module in its software.
With text-to-art, any user can auto-generate supporting images for a business presentation by simply inputting a few words describing the art sought.
*ChatGPT: Not Ready for Prime Time?: While businesses dream of a time when AI-powered chatbots can deftly automate everyday customer support, that hope remains unrealized.
Case in point: The new ChatGPT from OpenAI.
It promises more sophisticated chat for businesses and other users — but falls short, according to Nigel Powell, a writer for TechReport.
Observes Powell: “ChatGPT is billed as a chatbot that can ‘answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises’ and even reject inappropriate requests.”
In practice, it fumbles on a lot of those promises, Powell adds.
Observes Powell: “As we have to keep reminding ourselves, this is super-early days for public exposure to these AI tools.
“They lie, they make things up, they get confused.”
*Beauty Product Manufacturer Opts for AI-Automated Financial Reports: Beauty behemoth L’Oreal now uses AI-generated writing to auto-produce short, written notes for its financial controllers.
The company got help from Yseop — a pioneer in AI-generated business reports — to create the custom AI writing system it uses to auto-generate the reports.
Yseop uses a different AI tech than many AI writers on the market today, which make an educated ‘guess’ on what a user wants written, based on a few words of input.
Instead, Yseop’s system mines data from L’Oreal’s database and weaves the info into pre-configured story templates — a kind of modern version of mail merge.
Part of the AI magic built into these systems is the software’s ability to perform numerical analysis of company data as it makes its way into report templates.
For an in-depth, 2022 look at AI-generated business reports using Yseop’s data-to-text method, check out “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.
*United Robots: With AI, There’s Nothing But Blue Skies Ahead for Journalists: AI-writing service provider United Robots is cheering a new essay on AI automation, which concludes the tech does not threaten journalists’ jobs.
The essayist’s pitch: AI is actually a boon to newsrooms.
It automates mundane reporting that journalists would rather avoid.
And it communicates to would-be hires that the newsroom is on the cutting edge of technology.
If only.
For an alternate perspective, check-out, “The Robots Cometh: How artificial intelligence is automating writing jobs,” by Joe Dysart.
*New AI Helps Automate Contract Writing: AI continues to make inroads with lawyers — this time with new software that automates the inclusion of contract clauses from a law firm’s approved library.
An enhancement to CobbleStone Software, the new AI feature is designed to ensure that favorable clause language replaces unfavorable, error-prone clauses that otherwise might make their way into contracts and other documents.
Cobblestone specializes in contract management software solutions.
*OpenAI on OpenAI: A Key Designer Reflects on the Company’s History Making AI Writing Engine: Emerj — an AI research and advisory company — offers an interesting interview in this piece with Peter Welinder, one of GPT-3’s principal designers.
Welinder reveals to Emerj that even programmers at OpenAI have been surprised at GPT-3’s versatility.
Observes Welinder: “What became really amazing (after GPT-3 was first released in 2020) is that you could also apply (the model) to other use cases that just didn’t exist.
“We’ve seen our users apply it to things like extracting questions and answers from articles for summarizing pieces of text or doing semantic search in large document collections to doing things like writing great product descriptions or even like writing assistance or coding assistance.”
The supercomputer-driven GPT-3 is the underlying auto-writing engine for many commercial AI writers that are able to auto-generate writing with just a few words of input.
Those commercial AI writers specialize in offering user interfaces that run atop GPT-3.
*AI Poetry Writing Has Upped Its Game: A new enhancement to GPT-3 — one of the world’s most popular auto-writing engines — has made the tech better at creating rhyming poetry.
Observes Benj Edwards, a writer for Ars Technica: “On Hacker News, commenters expressed amazement after convincing GPT-3 to write a short rhyming poem explaining Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
“Another commenter asked GPT-3 to re-write the poem in the style of John Keats — and it obliged.”
You can judge for yourself GPT-3’s reported enhancement with its rhyming homage to Einstein:
If you want to understand Einstein’s thought
It’s not that hard if you give it a shot
General Relativity is the name of the game
Where space and time cannot remain the same
Mass affects the curvature of space
Which affects the flow of time’s race
An object’s motion will be affected
By the distortion that is detected
The closer you are to a large mass
The slower time will seem to pass
The farther away you may be
Time will speed up for you to see
*AI Big Picture: Even Some AI Experts are Fearful of AI: As AI programmers race to come-up with ever-more sophisticated tools, few are building in restraints to ensure AI remains human-friendly, according to Kelsey Piper.
Observes Piper, a writer for Vox: “Creating something smarter than us — which may have the ability to deceive and mislead us — and then just hoping it doesn’t want to hurt us is a terrible plan.
“We need to design systems whose internals we understand and whose goals we are able to shape to be safe ones.
“However, we currently don’t understand the systems we’re building well enough to know if we’ve designed them safely.”
Gulp.
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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.