You may have heard of the word processing addon “Grammarly” if you watch a lot of YouTube like myself you will have been subjected to one of their ads by now.
It boasts being a ‘must have’ for anyone who writes anything that will be read by anyone else, as well as being able to integrate with all desktop and mobile apps including SMS messaging.
Google recently announced an AI based writing tool for google docs, and this week in a blog, John Roach from Microsoft talked about “Ideas” – a new feature that will at first only be available on Word Online (which anyone can use for free with a personal Microsoft account).
This advancement in AI writing will have great benefits, one of the highlighted examples in the article:
“workers generally ignore tools available in Word to structure their documents, such as section heads, but rather manually make some words bold and bigger to indicate a new section.” The new Ideas feature can make it navigable, or could create a table of contents on your behalf”
https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-365-intelligent-workday-productivity/
As seems to be inevitable with AI, people are threatened and fear creative jobs will be replaced by bots that can formulaically write a viral article, which comes with other social ramifications, how could the bot differentiate between a real source and fake news? read more: https://writingcooperative.com/a-bot-that-creates-viral-articles-884752de6e1a
Some have tried to make bots that intentionally write fiction, but as narrative is an intuitive process, so the best writings have been compared as being “choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing”.
It seems the creativity of AI is little more than a “Who’s Line Is It Anyway” improv scenario generator, students at MIT have put a spin on this process whereby a bot named “Shelly” tweets the start of a new horror story every hour, inviting writers with the hashtag #yourturn, to take inspiration and continue the story.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/mit-collaborative-ai-horror-writer/
For now these advancements could take the menial workload off the shoulders of journalists and other writers, and will certainly increase the productivity of office workers in their word generating tasks, but could this lead to greater change threatening writing jobs in the future?
Michael
Michael is responsible for brand awareness, GDPR compliance and client support both on-site and remote. He can also deliver one-to-one training for our clients on how to use a Mac, as well as troubleshooting any problems clients have with their Mac computers.
If you would like to talk to Michael about GPDR compliance or Mac-related issues, please let me know and I will ask him to contact you and answer your questions.
Kamila
General Manager
Octagon Technology Ltd
