The Terminator film, despite mostly depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg going on a rampage, has dark themes about the dethroning of humanity and the rise of the machines. Although the creation of an artificial intelligence with the power to cause a nuclear apocalypse probably won’t happen any time soon, people have long been pushing the boundaries of AI – some to analyse and calculate logarithms at breakneck speeds, and others to simplify and bring convenience for our everyday tasks. But this begs the question: will AI one day become so efficient that our copywriting brains become obsolete? Join Wordsmith as we take a look at the progress of AI writers so far…
Is it as we feared?
According to Forbes and The Guardian, Microsoft recently laid off 27 journalists at MSN News and replaced them with AI writers. As with copywriting, journalism is a profession that requires dedication to the craft and years of experience to master. However, Microsoft seems certain that a robot can tackle news delivery better than experienced humans, so should we expect this trend to extend into copywriting as well?
Before we all go panicking and hollering about the end of our careers, Enrique Dans (the author of the Forbes article) points out that MSN News is simply an aggregator of news from other sources – meaning it does not identify new subject matter or perform investigative research. “The job consists of providing a panorama of what’s making the news, and from there, summarising, extracting, and writing in a particularly dispassionate manner,” explains Dans. “This kind of journalism may not be considered cutting edge, but these kinds of sites are consulted by millions of people every day, many of them appearing automatically when we open our browsers. I wonder if anybody will notice.”
In the case of rehashing news, it makes sense to automate the process – freeing up journalists’ schedules to work on a more hard-hitting piece (if you don’t choose to fire them instead, à la Microsoft). But even when working with AI-identified content, it does still take a bit of copywriting skill in order to convince a reader to click on a link. Are computers any good at stringing words together to tell a story?
There are a few robot writers out there. One is Automated Insight’s Wordsmith, which analyses raw data and then uses natural-language generation (NLG) to convert the data into a comprehensive summary with highlights on potential insights. It’s a handy tool for analysts and executives who have to go through tonnes of data on a daily basis, or just about anyone who wants to become more proficient at looking at data.
NLG can do more than just data analysis. With Persado, companies can have an AI examine their past campaigns to study how and what words best resonate with customers (through narratives, emotions, descriptions, call-to-actions, formatting and word positioning). The findings can then be applied to future marketing briefs to increase customer engagement. On average, Persado claims to be able to boost conversion by 41 percent!
However, both of the above examples requires us to feed information to the AI before it can get any work done. Is there a writing programme that can autonomously create copy based on a few bullet point facts?
The future of copywriting(?)
After a quick Google search we found AI Writer, a programme that can help you draft a complete article. Give it is a topic or headline, and AI Writer will scour the Internet for relevant sources and piece them together – all it takes is an email address for the free trial and a quick five minute wait. This sounds too good to be true, so we tested it out and gave it the topic “Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Copywriters?” Here’s what it came back with:
The [Sources: #] brackets in the AI Writer’s article reference back to the websites it had used. Links are provided as an appendix with each article.
Although the article is far from perfect, it’s impressive that a machine did all this in a few minutes. After introducing the topic, it builds a narrative flow starting with AI’s existing uses across industries, and then examines how it could be further improved or implemented.
Unfortunately, AI Writer is not the best at making consistent and solid arguments – evident in its haphazard use of quotes that don’t relate to the previous argument (and improper quote formatting) as well as scattered train of thought (jumping from the topic of NLG in one paragraph to SEO immediately after). AI Writer also tries to play to human emotion by describing why people would be afraid of being replaced by AI, but it’s a tad too melodramatic. Excessively charged phrases like “a wave of doom” and “merciless machines” detract from the professional tone of the piece, making the article sound like it was written by a student. The concluding paragraph isn’t much of a conclusion either, as it contains new supporting details (ie. OpenAI) and fails to wrap up the article.
Considering that it’s a free-to-use service, it’s unfair to judge AI Writer too harshly… at least not at the level of competency as OpenAI’s GPT-2, a high-functioning AI writer that is so good at making predictions and writing fiction, the creators initially refused to publicly release their research due to fears of misuse for creating fake news. However, it was recently released and you can try it out here.
When prompted with the same phrase, “Will Artificial Intelligence replace copywriters?”, it came back with:
“Xiao Sun’s words were short, yet direct. These were the words of an end-of-the-world apocalypse prophesied by an unlikely digital prophet, a Chinese entrepreneur and blockchain billionaire who’s making a formidable play for the left-behind talent of a generation. “I feel like there’s a lot of artificial intelligence out there in the world,” Xiao Sun said at a 2017 panel discussion at a Fortune 100 event in New York, where he spoke alongside tech leaders including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Brian Cox. “Maybe a digital age really is the end of the world as we know it.””
A chilling prediction, but perhaps not the most convincing…
Just as Luddite mill workers feared for their jobs after the advent of automated textile equipment, the thought of copywriters’ livelihoods being replaced by a machine is scary. But until programmes like AI Writer get a massive upgrade (or GPT-2 learns how to use citations), there’s no reason to fear. Instead, we can take advantage of AI’s incredible processing powers for tedious tasks like data collection and research, allowing us to focus on the more creative and emotional aspects of writing.