Why your next content gig hire might be an AI

By Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP. His books include Impact Mapping, Humans vs Computers and Running Serverless.

From a gimmick that lets you play music or turn on the lights using your voice, AI assistants are becoming a serious tool for content creators. Instead of getting people to help you with writing marketing materials, designing layouts or recording voice-over, you may soon be hiring an AI assistant.

Way back in ’97, Microsoft tried to provide a computerised assistant for helpful support. The attempt was commendable, but the technology just was not there, and the infamous Clippy was universally derided and unceremoniously killed. A quarter of century later, the technology is finally good enough to make automated content assistants truly useful.

Try making a PowerPoint presentation in Microsoft’s online Office365, and turn on the designer tab. You will probably be surprised by the quality of the suggestions. It’s not just the visuals that are interesting, it’s that the suggestions understand your content.

Type in a title related to geometry lessons, and you’ll see a playful design with rectangles and circles. Type something about financial planning, and you’ll see corporate visual templates. Automated assistants finally understand the context, allowing them to offer truly helpful suggestions.

The best showcase for the power of context-aware AI assistants is probably GPT, a text creation system developed by OpenAI. Give GPT some words to prompt it, and it continues to write. With incredible results. An oversimplified way to look at GPT is that it will try to guess the text statistically most likely to follow the prompt.

It will then join the result with the prompt and guess the next few words most likely to follow, continuing to write the story. It’s like improv theatre actors taking turns to invent a narrative, but in this case all the actors are an incredibly powerful AI.

Give GPT a question, and it will look for the statistically most likely words to start the answer, and then fill in the blanks to provide something that looks reasonable. Start typing a part of a conversation, and it will come up with a likely reply. Sure enough, automated chat assistants have been around for a while, and it’s difficult to get excited about that.

But what separates GPT from earlier attempts at text creation is its eerie ability to understand context. Prompted with some a text about the characters from Lord of the Rings, it continued to write a story about orcs and elves fighting over “two rings”. Give it a headline and it will write some pretty convincing announcements.

For this article, I gave GPT some slightly surreal topical news titles. Here is what came out (with only minor edits):

Prompt:

“Breaking news: Facebook acquires Ireland. The government announced”

Response:

Breaking news: Facebook acquires Ireland

The government announced this deal in a press release, noting that “Facebook has a proven track record of supporting local businesses and communities and we are confident this transition will be a great success.”

It will be interesting to see how Facebook operates in Ireland without the regulatory oversight that helped put a check on some of its more extreme antics in the United States. Facebook has been rumored to be on the lookout for a new base of operations since essentially suspending any plans to formally reincorporate as an Israeli company after heavy criticism. Now, with its Irish citizenship and corporate flag firmly planted, Facebook will slide smoothly back into the role of the rogue state it has played to such great profit in the US political climate.

In fact, a Facebook spokesperson told ABC News, “we are especially excited to maintain our heavy Irish heritage and will maintain many core values from our native Menlo Park,” including a laid-back attitude toward political corruption.

Another prompt:

“Mark Zuckerberg elected as Taoiseach of Ireland. This announcement came today”

Response:

Mark Zuckerberg elected as Taoiseach of Ireland

This announcement came today, the US web billionaire Zuckerberg has been surprising the world with his recent political comments. Now out of nowhere, Zuckerberg appears to have been elected Taoiseach of the Irish Republic. The announcement came from a political source in Dublin “We never intended for this to happen. Those freak voters really put an agenda on us all, Facebook has just deleted millions of users records so we are sure its been Zuckerberg all along.”

It is said Assistant Secretary of State for the United States of America Africa and Middle East divisions, Thomas Shannon, will represent and run the bid at the United Nations for Ireland to become one of the nations of Africa. Spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin Charles Flanagan described the move to Africa a good step by the global community away from authoritarian regimes.

A spokesman for the United Nations declared it would make Ireland part of the bilateral agreements reached between African nations earlier this year with little to no protest from the German President of the EU Commission.

These content snippets might sound silly, but remember that they were generated from just a few words making up a surreal title, in less than a second. With something more down-to-earth and a more restricted creativity setting, GPT produces unbelievably good content.

A dangerous weapon or a useful tool?

In the age of fake news and instant online outrage, automated content creation is a highly divisive topic.

Detractors will point out to deep-fakes, video and audio materials that look real but are lies. With automated content creation available as a service, deep fakes are easy enough and cheap enough to create to become a serious political weapon. To demonstrate the danger, MIT researchers released this August a fake video speech by Richard Nixon, talking about a disastrous mission to the Moon that never happened.

You don’t need to be an MIT boffin to create something believable. Companies like LOVO.ai and Voicery offer almost real audio with cloned celebrity voices, at the touch of a button.

On the other hand, automated content assistance has an immense time-saving potential. And this year marks the first time such technology become easily available to the general public.

Once tightly kept as a competitive advantage, many machine-learning technologies are becoming available as a utility on tap from major cloud providers. Anyone can “rent” deep-learning translation, speech comprehension or turning text to speech from Amazon, Microsoft or Google.  Such services are not really consumable by the average computer user, at least not in the sense how easily you can use the Powerpoint design tab. However, a new wave of startups is emerging to make those technologies available to everyday users.

For example, Invideo combines machine learning with templates and automated layouts to create videos from articles. Vidnami goes even further, trying to understand the text and automatically select accompanying video clips. Speechelo, along with LOVO.ai and Voicery, offer easy text-to-speech conversion. Narakeet makes it easy to create narrated videos from PowerPoint presentations by combining text-to-speech and automated video editing.

One area that could significantly benefit from magical assistants is remote education. With schools restarting and lockdowns still in force around the world, many educational institutions will have to organise a mix of in-person and remote lessons, and videos are essential for online learning. At the same time, very few educators have the means or the time required to record engaging videos.

A study by NCTQ in the US found that teachers can afford to spend, on average, only about 45 minutes a day planning lessons. An automated assistant that can take over some of that responsibility will give teachers back some precious time to work on the content.

Dr. Ronny Richardson from Kennesaw State University, one of the beta test users of Narakeet, says that it reduced the time to make a video from hours to minutes: “I loaded it and got the final video in under three minutes. Just recording and editing the audio would have taken me at least three hours.”

Today’s AI might not be able to win any creativity awards, but it can do the job for many everyday purposes, especially for secondary aspects of the content you need to produce. For example, it’s powerful enough to create voiceover where the content is more important than the emotions in the audio, to style a Powerpoint presentation so it is visually appealing, or to automate all the tedious parts of video editing for people just trying to create an online lecture.

The next time the neighbour’s dog is barking while you’re trying to record a voice-over, try one of the AI-powered assistants instead.

Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP. His books include Impact Mapping, Humans vs Computers and Running Serverless.

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