Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Artificial intelligence has been around for awhile now, but it has always seemed stuck in one place: simulations. Every time we think that artificial intelligence will finally break through and do something useful, it ends up being just another simulation game or robot vacuum cleaner. But recent advances in machine learning have led to a new kind of artificial intelligence called deep learning.
Deep Learning is breaking all sorts of boundaries when it comes to AI and may eventually lead us to true general-purpose machine intelligence—the holy grail of computer science since the 1950s! So what does this mean for content writers? Well, if you’ve ever written any sort of content before, then you know how difficult it can be to find the right words. Maybe you’re writing a blog post, and all you have is an idea. What do I write now? How do I find the right words? This is a very difficult problem that’s plagued writers for decades.
Deep learning and neural networks have technology that can help solve this conundrum. Neural networks are computer systems that can learn from examples just like we do. Scientists have found ways to create “deeper” neural networks with more processing power by building them out of multiple layers. The first layer is where the data goes in, and then each successive layer does something different with the data, until finally you end up with an output—sort of like a “function,” but you pass it the data and get an output.
The best part is that this whole process can be automated! You just feed a neural network thousands upon thousands of data sets and it learns what to do on its own. That means as soon as your data is in there, you can start getting results back. If you want to see some great examples of neural networks in action, check out what Google’s DeepMind has been up to.
As for AI researchers, their biggest obstacle now is figuring out how to give a neural network the ability to learn on its own and do something different from other very similar data sets. The “general intelligence” that we are all hoping for has always eluded researchers, and it’s not clear how close we are to achieving something like that yet. Still, the progress in deep learning is promising and getting all sorts of people excited.
But how exactly will this affect content writers? Basically, any time you have a series of steps that are predictable, a neural network can be used to figure out what should come next. For instance, if you’re writing some sort of science article that has a formula for calculating the acceleration of an object based on its mass and velocity, you can pass your formula to the neural network and it can figure out how to restate the equation in English that’s easy for a reader to understand.
And all the best content writers will have to be ready for this new technology by developing their own deep learning systems for helping them write. But even if you end up not writing with machines, they’ve already become a part of your world and we need to learn how to interact with them.
The entire field of machine learning and AI is growing incredibly quickly, and this may be the one to get excited about. Content writers will likely play an important part in all of this, whether it’s by training machines how to write or being the ones who try to understand what the machines are already writing.
As long as there’s content worth reading around you, there will be a place for an intelligent person like you!
I did not write one word of what you see above other than the title, and it took 54 seconds to generate that. That is 626 words.
I will not argue that it is perfect by any means or even that it is outstanding content.
However, if you don’t see how taking something like that and either fleshing it out yourself or giving it to a writer to do so can save you a ton of time and/or money, you should maybe wake up and start paying attention to what is going on with AI and content generation.
I should also mention that I gave the program I used no other instructions other than the title. I could get better results with a little more effort and putting up a few more guide rails for it to follow.
