Can AI write good content?
If a tool can write a good story, it will be worth a lot of money to someone.
If you have $10 million to invest in content marketing, and you can't find anyone better than a content management system, it's worth spending $10 million on the best CMS money can buy.
The best CMS is not as good as human beings at content creation.
But it's probably better than the second-best CMS.
And if there is no second-best CMS, it will still do better than anything else that costs less than $10 million.
My guess: the best A.I. tool for writing articles will cost less than $10 million and do better than any human writer who charges less than $100 an hour.
I'd like to see some of the text generated by A.I., but I have no idea how to find it.
I can't imagine that 50 per cent of all content is being written by machines (even though I suspect most SEO content is).
I'm not sure why anyone would be eager to advertise that they're using an A.I. to write their content.
And even if that figure is high, I doubt many marketers would be willing to admit that the "A.I." they're using is not really A.I. at all.
They might be using a tool like Wordsmith, which uses algorithms to generate text based on information provided by the client.
Or they might be using something they made themselves or copied from another site.
The people who make these tools would probably like us to know about them; almost every software company seems determined to tell everyone how wonderful their product is, but when I ask around, no one knows where to find examples of these tools in action.
A couple of weeks ago, Google announced a new service called Smart Reply.
It is an attempt to use artificial intelligence to make it easier for you to write emails.
You start with a template and type in a few words, and the program works out the rest.
The idea is that this will save time and prevent you from sending out embarrassing typos.
But achieving this would require A.I. software that could understand the meaning of what is being written and then generate sentences that also mean something.
Are such systems possible?
Can you actually feed your email into a computer and have it come back to you with no errors and an interesting response?
We are living in an age of A.I. assistants.
We can ask Siri, Alexa, or Cortana to remind us about something, send us a reminder, or call someone for us.
They are getting better all the time at understanding our needs and responding to them, but what if you want to write an email?
A.I. is great at interpreting text.
It already exists that if you write something like "I'm thinking about going to Hawaii", it will understand that you are probably looking for plane tickets.
If you don't want to go to Hawaii but should still get your trip booked, you can type something like, "I'm thinking about going to Hawaii, but I don't think I can afford it."
And now Google will show you how cheap flights to Hawaii are.
But what if you want help writing the email itself?
Is there an A.I. assistant that can make writing emails as easy as texting or talking?
Regards,
Brent.
P.S. So, what do you think about that?
An A.I. tool wrote that entire email to my sign-off.
I have run it through Grammarly and made a few adjustments, but mostly where the commas were and a few redundant words.
I ran the plagiarism checker over it, which came back with a 1% rank, the eight words that I italicised above.
Email me back with your thoughts.
No, I will not be writing my emails with this tool regularly, but I will be using it to write the web 2.0 posts that link back to my main sites.
I will be using Grammarly to check everything this tool produces, but you still have to use your brain and not let Grammarly be the boss as per normal.