You can add magazine editing to the list of use cases for IBM's Watson AI technology. The company teamed up with marketing firm The Drum, giving its staff access to Watson, which they then used to help edit a recently published special edition of their in-house magazine:
The Drum has released the first magazine edited using artificial intelligence (AI) following a partnership with IBM Watson to create the special issue.
The magazine ... includes a number of features that involved the analytical functions that IBM's AI can provide in order to examine the role such technology can provide to modern day marketers.
Watson has also been trained to answer questions put to it by industry luminaries around the insights of advertising legend David Ogilvy and a number of predictions around potential winners at Cannes Lions this year have also been made by the AI.
Gordon Young, editor-in-chief of The Drum, commented: "The Drum was given the opportunity to play with the IBM Watson system to help create this issue and, as a result, much of our content benefits from artificial intelligence. You can judge for yourself whether that is better than our normal intelligence.
As the AI industry evolves, many observers have questioned whether it will someday replace workers entirely rather than merely provide them with better tools to do their jobs.
On that topic, IBM Watson GM David Kenny had this to say in an op-ed published in the special issue:
The goal is neither self-awareness nor autonomy. Rather the forefront of cognitive computing is advanced systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with us naturally. The aim? To help humans make better decisions.
Analysis: The Creative Class Will Remain Relevant in An AI-Driven World
In any event, The Drum's staff clearly played the key creative roles in the special edition—it's not as if Watson decided which stories should be written for it, and how. Still, there is precedent for machine-written prose, such as that created by Wordsmith, a program developed by Automated Insights.
Last year, Wordsmith and a reporter for National Public Radio had a contest of sorts, with each writing a short news article on a Wendy's earnings announcement. While the NPR reporter's story was arguably superior thanks to his stylistic flourishes and additional insights on the company, Automated Insights is making a big effort to develop its AI platform further to provide more personalized prose that sounds like it was written by a human.
Scary stuff for journalists, who hardly need more career angst? Not necessarily. The Associated Press has actually partnered with Automated Insights and uses a version of Wordsmith to generate financial news stories. As a result, the AP has increased the number of companies it reports on each quarter tenfold, and no writing jobs have been lost. Instead, human staffers are freed up to update the initial, machine-generated story with more color, detail and reporting, as well as spend time on other types of projects—time-intensive ones that require field work, phone calls and other, er, human interactions.
That said, it's much easier to see a world where AI plays the central role in creating some types of high-volume content, such as shopping website product descriptions. (Automated Insights offers a number of other examples, such as airport delay notifications and crime reports, on its website.)
The notion of helping workers work smarter and generate more value is one of the big sweet spots for AI in the enterprise, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
"For decades enterprise software vendors have been promising to improve productivity," he says. "This has been delivered by adding more tools; email, blogs, wikis, enterprise social networks, group chat, file sharing, et cetera. While these tools have improved the way we work, they have also burdened us with an overabundance of information and connections. Artificial intelligence is poised to be the assistant we've always wished we had."
"If software can help automate mundane and repetitive tasks comma aggregate together different sources of information and find patterns and insights then perhaps employees will realize the benefit of improved productivity that we've been promised for so long," he adds. Amen to that.
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