News articles, weather reports or even business insights, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a significant role in generating these kinds of texts. AI has become a big part of our lives – it is deeply rooted in many day-to-day activities. A lot of companies have implemented AI in their business to take advantage of its benefits. In some cases, AI is even capable of replacing humans in their job. While people were needed to write the simplest content in the past, computers are now capable of writing these texts. But how does this technology work?
The technology that is used to help computers understand language the same way as humans do is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here, you can think of understanding the feeling of a text, speech recognition, and generating reactions to questions. Deep learning – which is a subfield of AI – is used in many NLP implementations, such as chatbots that handle customer service questions, auto-spellcheck, and AI assistants as Siri on smartphones.
NLP can be divided into Natural Language Generator (NLG) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). While NLG software can write, NLU reads human language and turns its unstructured data into structured data to make it understandable to computers.
The first step in an NLG process is defining what format of the content is desired. Each content type has a unique writing style and structure. Secondly, the end-user, NLG solution or software provider builds the narrative design. The end-goal of NLG is to generate an output that could have been written by a human.
The use of NLP has both advantages and disadvantages. Many companies have decided to implement this technology to make journalists’ jobs easier and faster – the system is not replacing them. Writers will be given more time to focus on the content and writing style of an article, instead of spending their time on fact-checking and research. A downside of AI written content is the chance of discrediting reliable media channels, by not having quality content as a priority. In short, AI can be of high value when generating written content, but one must still assure a text’s quality.
Please let me know your thoughts on this subject. Do you think you will be able to identify content that was created by AI? And do you think AI will ever be able to generate human-like responses?
References
Beysolow, T. (2018). Applied natural language processing with python: implementing machine learning and deep learning algorithms for natural language processing. Berkeley, CA: Apress. Available at: https://eur-on-worldcat-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/oclc/1052613113 (Accessed: 2020)
Kendall, S. (2020). What is Natural Language Generator (NLG)? [Online] Available at: https://narrativescience.com/resource/blog/what-is-natural-language-generation/ (Accessed: 4 October 2020)
Sciforce (2019). A Comprehensive Guide to Natural Language Generation. [Online] Available at: https://medium.com/sciforce/a-comprehensive-guide-to-natural-language-generation-dd63a4b6e548 (Accessed: 4 October 2020)
Martin, N. (2019). Did A Robot Write This? How AI Is Impacting Journalism. [Online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/02/08/did-a-robot-write-this-how-ai-is-impacting-journalism/#57e329a67795 (Accessed: 4 October 2020)
Hi Evy, I found your post about artificial intelligence in written content really interesting to read! I liked that you considered both the possible advantages and disadvantages of computers writing journalistic articles. In my opinion artificial intelligence is a technology that will change the process of writing content the coming years. You wrote that content quality could go down, due to the lower priority. I would like to counter this argument. I believe that artificial intelligence can instead help make the content quality better. By identifying patterns of real data sources on a bigger scale than humans can, and thus ensuring a better quality of information (Schmelzer, 2019). Further they can help find and delete ´fake´ information that is created and posted by bots, that are designed to cause confusion. In my opinion the technological challenge however for AI will be if the technology will ever be able to truly delete all the ´fake news´. As most people have a lot of different perspectives and opinions about the news, and do not always agree on whether news is true or fake. Then how will machines be able to do this?
I added a forbes article below related to AI in news and journalism, that i thought you might find interesting
Schmelzer, R. (2019). AI making waves in news and journalism. [Online]. Available at
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/23/ai-making-waves-in-news-and-jouralism/#5ed9c3e67748