Artificial intelligence is here and is developing at astonishing speed. We can debate the merits and drawbacks forever, but the simple fact is it’s here to stay and will undoubtedly change lives.
The purpose of this article isn’t to dwell on where AI will take us in the future but answer how the technology creates and delivers unique content.
Natural language generation
More and more media organisations are experimenting with using AI to create content. Leading names like the Associated Press, Reuters, and The Washington Post already use AI to create and publish articles. The Press Association ‘writes’ around 30,000 local news articles a month, solely using AI.
Financial bulletins, issued daily by major corporations and businesses, are another area where AI has stepped in and removed the human role.
But how is this content created? AI content technology uses natural language generation. Different tones of voices are essential for AI-generated content to sound authentic like a ‘real person’ has written it.
The user defines different types of content. In the early days of AI, this would mean the user generated rules and style guides for the computer. Now, solutions are provided by the biggest names in the industry
Amazon’s Polly, Google’s Text-to-Speech, Quill’s Narrative Science, or in-house tools like The Washington Post’s Heliograf boast numerous templates like personalised marketing, business data reports, in-app and computer bot tools, financial updates, news, and more.
The success of these tools relies on vast amounts of data – in this case, content – fed into the learning software. For a news article to sound human, millions of actual news articles must be processed. This ensures tone and style is accurate and what one would expect to read from a news article.
A marketing email would use a different, more personalised style. For AI to accurately reproduce this, it needs to ‘read’ mountains of marketing data.
Unique content
How is unique content assured? Many things ensure content is unique and not used again.
Firstly, natural language generators are all fed different pieces of content. Polly and Quill, for example, will have different coding, use other sources, and will produce entirely different articles, even if the same question is asked.
The only way these pieces of AI can improve is if they are continually fed more and more content. No two language generators will be provided with the same content, so they will learn and evolve in their own way. Coding prevents AI from creating the same content again – the software is trained to avoid repetition and replication. They also have in-built plagiarism detectors to ensure they are not copying previously published work.
User personas
Marketing AI takes and develops user personas based on a user’s habits and likes. Big companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Tik Tok have incredibly detailed and strong AI technologies to keep people on their platform.
No one human is the same as another. Even two people watching the same video will view it in different ways. Some will watch the advert before, some will skip as soon as possible, and others will watch some of the ad before getting bored.
The video itself will see some people watch it one go, others pause and come back, and others switch before it finishes. All these tiny differences are processed into different metrics and processed to come up with recommendations for your next video.
If someone watched a 10-minute video all the way through, their next video suggestion would certainly be different to the user who got bored after four minutes and clicked off.
The content is unique to the user because they are also unique in their habits, likes, and dislikes.
A growing trend
AI is being pioneered in new industries all the time. Modern online casinos such as Mount Gold are using Netflix-style learning algorithms to build profiles of what type of online slots their players are enjoying, so they can suggest related games and build an incredibly personalised gaming experience.
And food takeaway apps meticulously evaluate your buying history to suggest new restaurants and offers discount codes on your favourite foods.
AI is effective because it has access to so much data and is constantly updating and improving. AI can, therefore, produce unique content because it is learning from unique humans and millions of data sources.
