2022 turned-out to be the year that word of AI writing’s arresting prowess entered the public water supply.
Triggering that perception: OpenAI’s release of chatGPT — a refined version of its AI writing software — which is able to auto-generate lucid, mostly on-target prose with just a simple text input.
Essentially, people the world over discovered: Ask the chatGPT bot a question, and more often than not it will auto-generate a frighteningly well-written answer of up to 500 words — in just seconds.
Granted, the general public also discovered that chatGPT is not perfect: The AI writing engine has a tendency to make-up facts on occasion, or veer-off from the kind of writing you’re seeking.
But overall, chatGPT’s ability to auto-generate very good responses most of the time triggered a news media frenzy over the autowriter’s abilities that achieved super-nova status.
Meanwhile, other key AI writing stories for 2022 that firmly established the tech’s growing influence across the writing world included:
*A columnist’s confession that many of his pieces over a period of months were auto-generated by an AI writer — and no one noticed
*An AI writing tool that won a top award in the European Digital Publishing Awards for its automated coverage of elections
*New AI tools that now enable you to customize an AI writer to write in your voice
Here’s a complete rundown on the stories in AI writing that helped shape the direction of the industry in 2022:
*chatGPT: Next Generation AI Writing Arrives: While OpenAI has a knack for knocking the world on its keyster with its AI writing tech, it outdid itself with its release of chatGPT earlier this month.
The AI tech has the ability to auto-generate written responses of up to 500 words to virtually any question asked of it — in seconds.
Currently, many in the top echelons of the world’s news media — as well as countless other knowledge workers across dozens of industries — are gushing over chatGPT’s writing prowess.
And many in the news media and others have also been triggered once again by the fear: Will AI take my job away?
This piece offers an in-depth look at the impact of chatGPT on 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.”
*AI is Coming for Copywriters: Brian Nizinsky, a digital marketing manager at Paychex, says copywriters need to brace themselves for the pervasive proliferation of automated writing across their profession.
Nizinsky cites a 2021 study by Drift and Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, which found 79% of marketers believe AI will be able to outdo writers by 2024.
Nizinsky’s reaction: “Most marketers aren’t willing or able to invest significant time and energy into creating effective marketing copy — they don’t have the in-house expertise or the funds to hire someone else.
“So why not let machines do what they do best — produce large amounts of consistent content faster than any human ever could — and use the savings to hire creative professionals who can dream-up truly unique campaign ideas?”
In a perfect world, sounds great.
But in a ‘good enough’ world, who knows if all those creative professionals would be hired — or even keep their current jobs.
For an alternate perspective on the impact of AI-generated writing on jobs, check-out: “The Robots Cometh: How artificial intelligence is automating writing jobs,” by Joe Dysart.
*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 one human editor and one human manager, according to Retresco, the AI company behind the AI-generated writing tool.
*77% Publishers: AI Critical to Future Success: A new study finds 77% of news publishers see AI as a key to their success during the next three years.
Publishers featured in the study currently use AI to help auto-generate news stories, manage paywalls, tamp-down loss of readers and auto-surface archived content where appropriate.
Says Dean Roper, director of insights, World Association of News Publishers, the group that spearheaded the study:
“This is not relegated to just publishers with deep pockets, nor to the usual pioneers in the business.
“Small publishers all over the world are innovating, partnering (and) developing AI solutions for their companies.”
*Report: The Robot Take-Over of Journalism is Real: According to a new report released by AI4 media, AI is eliminating news reporting jobs previously held by humans.
Observe AI4 researchers: “Several newsrooms have fired journalists because their work was now done by robot journalists.
“The most known example is Microsoft replacing 27 journalists by an AI system in 2020.”
The report’s findings fly-in-the-face of relentless, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ assurances from numerous news publishers during the past few years — which have adopted automated writing while assuring everyone that no writing jobs would be lost as a result.
“We foresee that in the near-future, every newsroom worldwide will make use of AI technologies in one or another way,” the researchers add.
*AI Writing Now the ‘It’ App: A piece in The New York Times confirms that AI-generated writing — along with similar AI creation tools — is now the ‘it’ app.
The tools, which also go by the buzz-phrase ‘generative AI,’ are turning the heads of myriad Silicon luminaries, including Sergey Brin, co-founder, Google.
Observes writer Kevin Roose: “It’s been a banner year, in particular, for generative AI apps that turn text prompts into an image.
“DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day, according to the company.
“Midjourney, another popular AI image generator released this year, has more than three million users in its official Discord server.
“That kind of growth has set off a feeding frenzy among investors hoping to get in early on the next big thing.”
*Now AI Writes in Your Voice: Writer Christopher Kokoski says he’s found an easy way to build an AI tool that auto-writes in his style.
An avowed non-programmer, Kokoski says he’s using a service on the Web – Riku.ai – which enables even a novice to quickly build a custom tool to write in the style of any human writer.
Kokoski uses the tool by first loading countless numbers of articles he has written into Riku.ai’s prompt builder.
Then he chooses a supercomputer-driven autowriter like GPT-3, also accessible from within the Riku.ai interface, to ingest and study his articles — and ultimately discern and mimic his writing style.
Once the custom autowriter is created, Kokoski says triggering the tool to write an article in his voice is simply a matter of loading-in a detailed article outline – complete with a series of prompts – and then allowing the tool to work its magic.
Kokoski is so jazzed with his results, he’s decided to create a custom autowriter using Riku.ai for each one of his Web sites – which cover different topics.
Meanwhile, another AI writing service provider — Writer — now offers similar, ‘auto-generate writing in your own style’ capability with its new module ‘CoWrite.’
Bottom-line: Sites like Riku.ai and tools like CoWrite could become game-changers for AI writing.
The reason: While many pro writers have eyed AI-writing with interest during the past few years, many have hung back, unwilling to use tools that produced a style of writing that sounded too generic.
Sites like Riku.ai and tools like CoWrite could change all that.
Essentially, once pro writers find they’re able to auto-generate articles in their precise writing styles – i.e., writing that meets their exacting standards of phrasing, wit, taste and the like – it will be tough for them to resist using those tools to at least auto-generate some writing.
*Automated Legalese Gets More Customizable: Already helping businesses quickly process scores of generalized agreements, AI-automated contracts from Evisort can now be trained to feature uncommon clauses and wording as well.
Essentially, the ‘instant-contract’ company has opened an ‘Automation Hub,’ which enables users to train Evisort software to auto-write contracts that are more customized.
Evisort says the process needed to train its software for custom wording is non-technical – although it does take a bit of time.
*Coming to a Newsroom Near You: AI-Generated Images: While hard news types tend to be leery of using fabricated images with news stories, some are apparently making an exception for text-to-art images.
That includes the BBC.
Observes Joe Whitwell, a product manager at BBC: “Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows that finding good images is time-consuming.
“So, we use Extractive Summarisation here.”
The tool works by using keywords in an article as text prompts for the text-to-art generator — which in turn auto-produces a fabricated image that’s posted along with the news story.
Long-term, that could add graphic artists — especially those in low-funded, local news operations — to the list of news professionals who could see their jobs gobbled-up by AI.
Share a Link: Please consider sharing a link to https://RobotWritersAI.com from your blog, social media post, publication or emails. More links leading to RobotWritersAI.com helps everyone interested in AI-generated writing.
–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.