How AI will kill most writing work— a real life story
This is a concrete example on how artificial intelligence helps writers.We shrank the writing time of our reports from 15 hours to 1/2 hour and started to love our work again.
No, your phone’s virtual assistant won’t be telling you what to do with your company or life. Neither will computers develop consciousness. The artificial intelligence revolution is much more ordinary than envisioned by AI evangelists.
The original promise of information technology has finally become a reality, and the machines are freeing us from all mechanical and boring work. Now knowledge workers can focus on thinking and being creative. Being human.
We shrank the writing time of our reports by 95%
This is a story of how we shrank the writing time of our consultancy reports by 95%, while our job satisfaction rose to new levels. All we needed was common sense about writing, simple artificial intelligence and an elegant user interface to connect humans to machines.
Underhood Audit, a report that got robotized
Underhood Audit tells brands how to become popular on social media. The report is based on data from Underhood, our online service that assigns daily social reputation and popularity scores to thousands of brands.
Audit was launched to help our clients with solutions and clear improvement tips, not just metrics. Brands wanted to know how they can shine on social media and beat their competitors.
Audit has three parts
- Social media channels analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Five concrete and tailored tips to help each client improve their social media presence.
Before automatization it took 15 hours to create an Audit from data provided by Underhood analysis. Most of the work was mechanical, manual labor: adding data to the tables, copying parts from earlier Audits and remembering the key elements and points repeated in every report. The same irritating work that consultants around the globe do every day.
We could not scale up. And we hated our work. It was that same old scrubbing that we as journalists, consultants and book editors had been doing since the ’90s.
From 15 hours to half an hour
Then we started a project that would shrink our writing time from 15 hours to half an hour and make us smile again.
Basics of robotised writing: a symbiosis between human and a machine
First thing to realize, when creating writing systems, is that computers are stupid. Machines calculate and remember data with ease, but they are useless in understanding the meaning of things. But machines get never bored or stressed; they are happy to do complex mechanical work.
Computers are stupid
We humans stress easily. We are hopelessly slow calculators, and we get stuck if we need to remember too many things simultaneously. But we love reasoning, solving complex problems and being creative.
There is no point in trying to make machines resemble us humans. The task of humanizing machines is doomed to be a never-ending academic project that never delivers real results. The real point is to make humans and machines work in symbiosis, both benefiting from each other’s skills.
Symbiosis between humans and machines is the point
How to do that? It’s all in the user experience, UX. The more transparent and obvious the user experience is, the more we humans like working with computer systems.
Writer becomes editor-in-chief
Our solution to make a teachable text generation system was to hide the teaching of AI from the writer as well as possible.
When a knowledge worker who is an expert in her field works with machines, there is no need to stress her with alien user interfaces complete with menus, forms, checkboxes or other UI elements.
Main point: look and feel like a normal text processor
Our main point was to make the system look and feel like a normal text processor, so our expert can edit a text like any other document she has received from another writer. Like an editor-in-chief in a media house or a senior expert in a consultancy company.
The main benefit is that the human writer does not need to be a coder or a geek. Only expertise and knowledge matter. With our system, anyone can become an AI teacher.
This is how our system works from the writer/expert point of view
- Artificial intelligence system creates a report and uploads it to Google Drive
- Writer edits the report in Google’s text editor
- All the changes (edited text blocks) are stored automatically in our database with metadata (keywords, data values, etc.)
- Going forward, the system creates new reports from the best matching text blocks stored in the database, and the more blocks there are, the smarter the system is
As we see it, this is the most elegant way to teach machines to write. After the template with rules and learning logic is in place, teaching is as intuitive as it can get.
Any expert can become an AI teacher
Benefits of working with learning systems
From our own experience, we can say that we are happy. Finally we can focus on thinking, creativity and helping our clients.
Our workload has almost vanished, and the human part needed to finalize our reports is interesting and enjoyable.
Focus on thinking, creativity and helping our clients
Our reports have become better. The strict format and databased approach has made our reports clear and easy to understand. And there’s no chance of an error in the reports resulting from human memory lapses or biases.
It’s good for business too. Scaling the consultancy work is now easy.
Future will be enjoyable
So far we have been developing this for our own use only.
Machines are as good writers as their teachers are
Nevertheless, we see that in the near future, great writers will be using the simplest interfaces to teach machines to create texts because machines are as good writers as their teachers are. No coding skills will be needed.
Anything that can be automated, will be automated. There is no need for us humans to stress ourselves with anything that computers can do faster and more accurately.
Writing will become enjoyable
New exciting professions will emerge. Text logic designers will be the elite of a new era of writing. These half-writers, half-logicians will create rules for automated data-based texts, and their skills will be highly appreciated.
Writing will become enjoyable. Finally.
Interested? Get a free report from Underhood
This system is really as elegant as we’ve described here.
What to do
- Go to underhood.co/audit
- Fetch a free sample of your report or order your Audit straight away
- Get excited and contact us: contact@underhood.co
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Underhood is a service that measures the reputation of companies, brands and organisations on the Internet automatically. At Underhood, everyone sees each other’s reputation ratings, and can learn what works on social web. Underhood works closely with the academic community.
Check your own reputation: https://underhood.co
Get your Audit report now: https://underhood.co/audit
