With the development of artificial intelligence, writers are increasingly wrestling with a hard truth: It appears robots are coming for their jobs. Little more than a plaything of researchers a decade ago, Al and automated (自动化的) robots are regularly producing countless articles on a daily basis.
Observes Mayur Bhatt, marketing head, SEO Services Guru: "It is only a matter of time before algorithms (算法) are able to write articles on any topic and for any target group. " Adds noted author Stephen Marche: "Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. " People of writing driven by AI insist the robots are simply here ‘to serve humanity'. Robots will do the hard labor work, they say. Writers will be freed-up to engage in more interesting, more in-depth and more creative work.
But for the many writers and editors who have already lost their jobs to Al, that pleasant future is a tough sell. Consider Radar, a hyper-local news service that has been generating (生成) AI-written articles in the UK since 2017. Instead of using reporters to cover news beats, Radar relies on robots. Those machines mine government databases on crime, health, environment and similar--and then auto-write stories from that data with an extremely local hook. For example: Radar's AI software can ingest a new government report on crime across the UK, and then auto-generate hundreds of customized (订制的）stories from the study, based on localized data. Each story is hyper-localized to a town or even a smaller community by including data from the government report. The resulting micro-focused stories are sold to news companies throughout Britain--as well as to any other news companies that might be interested. Gary Rogers, editor-in-chief, Radar: "There is open data across all the main beats of news-health, crime, transport, etc. --filled with stories waiting to be told. "
So far, many writers are aware of the adoption of Al-generated writing via a few,
well-publicized stories about the tech's use at major news organizations like Bloomberg, the BBC and The New York Times. But it turns out those above represent only smattering of what's really going on. A 2021 study found that 15% of news stories are now automatically generated at leading news companies using AI. Moreover, the adoption of Al-generated writing has gone far beyond news-reporting, cropping-up across a wide range of writing jobs.
To date, human beings still best their robot competitors in writing of the highest quality. Even so, the hard fact remains that AI will be producing an increasing number of automated writing in coming years that competes in a world often entrapped in the icy hold of ‘good enough'.
