Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I was on Twitter the other day when something leaped out of the torrent at me. “Create unique article on any topic in just a click,” the tweet said.

Could this be for real? Could a robot do a better job than I — a professional freelance writer — could?

Considering that writers and content creators like me are doomed if so, I figured I better check it out.

TRYING OUT THE WORD-O-MATIC

So I clicked and landed here , a somewhat dodgy looking page that said Unique Article Creator “is the best article generator tool to generate SEO friendly unique articles from your keyword.” The unidentified people behind the site say the tool finds fresh content and then rewrites it to be unique and have stronger search engine optimization (SEO)....

Scribes everywhere, look alive: Google is now funding a project which will use AI to write automated news stories,

The Press Association, a UK news agency, received about $807,000 from the third round of Google’s Digital News Initiative funding. Their project? Reporters and Data and Robots, or RADAR, an AI/human collaborative news site which will produce “a daily diet of compelling stories.”

RADAR is listed on the DNI site as a “large” project, with a goal towards providing a steady stream of ready-made content for smaller news sites....

Chatbots saw a massive resurgence last year, as  Google, Microsoft and Facebook all jumped on the bandwagon. Facebook has been actively encouraging chatbot development with its Messenger platform, recently making it easier for users to find relevant bots.

A few tech publications have taken to adopting bots on Messenger too, but which ones are worth using? We’ve got a few picks for you....

Amanda Stent, a natural language processing researcher at Bloomberg, said data scientists want to work with journalists to create mutually-beneficial solutions. “I see the newsroom working with data science to create very forward looking, fast and accurate journalism, both text and multimedia,” she said. “I think it’s incredibly exciting and really helps people who are consumers of media to make better decisions and be better informed.”

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks, said that humans need to begin to discuss the ethical implications of machine learning and to understand how machines interact with human experiences. “Our sense as human beings that we have this ability to be able to do things that machines can’t do is going to be challenged, and we need to start thinking about this,” he said.

Borthwick pointed to the fact that political bots had a significant impact on how Americans thought about the 2016 presidential candidates and how they voted.