Q2 brought the kind of AI writing news that many editors and writers have hoped they’d never hear: A columnist used AI to write his column for a few months — and no one noticed the difference.
That ruse goes a long way toward refuting the yowls of many who insist AI will never replace human writers, AI will never advance beyond simple data-driven stories and AI will never steal the jobs of sophisticated bards who trade on wit, style and insight.
Meanwhile, a venture capitalist came out with the frothy prediction that a wave of billion dollar startups in language-related AI is underway.
And yet another earth-shaker for editors and writers: Google announced that it currently sees prose forged with machine learning tools as spam.
Still other head-turners in Q2:
~The New York Times served-up an extremely in-depth look at AI-generated writing and its implications for our future
~Google announced that its widely popular Google Docs software now offers auto-summarization
~AI is now a wine critic
Here’s the rundown on the top ten stories in AI writing this quarter that brought home how thoroughly the ever-evolving tech is re-shaping the writing world:
*Confessions of a Robot Columnist: Everyone Was Fooled: Columnist Ian Warden fesses-up that he’s pulled-the-wool over everyone’s eyes: Half the columns he published this year were actually written by AI.
The upshot: “Not one reader detected any artificiality or anything sub-human” in the columns machined by AI, according to Warden.
Yucks aside, the ruse goes a long way toward refuting the yowls of many who insist AI will never replace human writers, AI will never advance beyond simple data-driven stories and AI will never steal the jobs of sophisticated bards who trade on wit, style and insight.
Observes Warden: “I have ended the experiment now — and this column you are reading is by the flesh-and-blood Ian — but conducted it to illustrate the ways in which AI begins to achieve things we used to smugly think only humans would ever be able to do.”
As a man much wiser than me once said: “Gulp.”
*A Wave of Billion Dollar Language AI Startups Is Coming: Rob Towes offers an extremely in-depth look at the coming gold rush in AI-generated writing and language apps in this piece.
Observes Towes: “We now stand at an exhilarating inflection point.
“Next-generation language AI is poised to make the leap from academic research to widespread real-world adoption — generating many billions of dollars of value and transforming entire industries in the years ahead.”
*Google: AI-Generated Writing is Spam: Before you populate your next blog or Web site with torrents of AI-generated writing, beware: Google considers the practice spam.
Observes John Mueller, search advocate, Google: “For us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do.
“My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old-school tools.
“But for us, it’s still automatically generated content.
“And that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines.
“So we would consider that to be spam.”
Even so, Mueller admits that Google may not be able to suss-out AI-generated writing without the scrutiny of Google’s human reviewers.
*The New York Times: AI Writing and Its Implications: If you’re looking for an extremely in-depth look at the origins, workings and impact of AI writing powered by supercomputer auto engines like GPT-3, this is your baby.
One of GPT-3’s many attractions examined in this article: It’s mystery.
Observes Steven Johnson, the author of this ambitious analysis of AI writing: “One puzzling — and potentially dangerous — attribute of deep-learning systems generally is that it’s very difficult to tell what is actually happening inside the model.
“You give the program an input, and it gives you an output.
“But it’s hard to tell why exactly the software chose that output over others.
“This is one reason the debate about large language models exists.
“Some people argue that higher-level understanding is emerging – thanks to the deep layers of the neural net.
“Others think the program by definition can’t get to true understanding simply by playing ‘guess-the-missing-word’ all day.
“But no one really knows.”
*Google Docs Adds Auto-Summary Help: Google Docs now has the ability to auto-summarize the docs you work with every day — including reports, reviews, briefs, policies and the like.
Specifically, the tech generates a one or two sentence summary of docs — as long as it’s confident the summary is accurate.
The summaries can be auto-generated for users of Google Workspace — and manually generated in other versions of Google Docs.
*At LivePerson, AI Now Rides Shotgun With Chat Reps: LivePerson, one of the pioneers of customer service via chat support, has enhanced its solution with AI-aided analysis that includes suggested chat responses.
Dubbed ‘ConversationAssist,’ the tech analyzes every message sent by a customer during a chat and serves-up AI recommended answers — when appropriate — that chat reps have the option of dropping into their responses if they choose.
AI-enhanced LivePerson can also steer customers to chatbots when appropriate — or port customers from a chatbot to a human being when it looks like the chatbot is struggling with a customer.
Says Rob LoCascio, CEO, LivePerson: “Powered by our natural-feeling AI, Conversation Assist’s enhanced recommendation engine helps balance the efficiency of bots — and human touch of a brand’s agents — to provide consumers with even more efficient and helpful conversations.”
*A Tiny News Niche — With 1.5 Million Readers: While you’d be hard-pressed to find a news niche tinier than the sport of ping pong, you’d probably find it even tougher to attract 1.5 hits to the Web site that covers it.
Jochen Lang, CEO, MyTischtennis has done just that — with a little help from AI.
Lang’s secret: He uses AI-generated writing from AX Semantics.
The tech automates news coverage of table tennis matches hosted by five table tennis associations across Germany.
Lang’s winning approach: He takes the match data from the associations, runs it through AX Semantics’ AI-generated writing software and takes away a short news story on each match.
Says Lang: “The editorial offering has clearly struck a chord with users.
“Thanks to automated match reports, we have more traffic and 1.5 million readers per season.”
(For an in-depth look at how AI-generated writing from AX Semantics — and similar AI writing companies — is also used to auto-generate business reports, check out: “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.)
*Now AI’s a Wine Critic: A team of researchers has put together a prototype app that homogenizes many reviews of a wine to produce a new one.
The researchers — from Dartmouth University — pulled-off the feat by training their system on hundreds of thousands of already published reviews.
Getting AI to review wine is relatively easy, they say, given that wine reviewers rely on a narrow, predictable vocabulary of standardized terms to rate wines.
Turns out, beer reviewers are similarly disciplined when it comes to evaluating beer.
So the researchers also designed the system to write beer reviews.
The reviews take the form of a few, pithy sentences, such as: “Pretty dark for a rosé, and full-bodied, with cherry, raspberry, vanilla and spice flavors. It’s dry with good acidity.”
The upshot: “The hope is that AI can benefit reviewers facing larger writing workloads and consumers who have to sort through so much content about products,” says Prasad Van, a member of the research team and a professor of business administration at Dartmouth.
*Associated Press: Now a Johnny Appleseed of AI Journalism: Add the Associated Press to the list of organizations driving the use of automated writing in small newsrooms.
The media outlet is offering a free online course in AI in journalism — available to all U.S. news outlets.
Featured will be live virtual workshops and recorded tutorials.
Says Aimee Rinehart, program manager of AP’s local news AI initiative: “We will be digging into a range of technologies and focusing on the pain points that AI and automation can help to alleviate at the local level.”
*AI Snares European Award for Automated Election Coverage: AI won a top award in the European Digital Publishing Awards for its automated coverage of elections for the Rheinische Post.
The AI tool churned-out dozens of hyper-local stories on election results — just minutes after the final vote counts were in.
Squiring the entire automated election process coverage was a single editor and manager, according to Retresco, the AI company behind the AI-generated writing tool.
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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.