This is an example of what one AI Writing Assistant, Rytr, can produce.
PG wrote a short description to seed the AI:
Many authors, both new and experienced, are becoming self-published and maintaining complete control over their books.
He then added key words for the output:
self-publishing, Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing, independent author, authors
PG then asked Rytr to create some variants of the output and clicked a button on the screen.
Here are the three variants that PG liked the best:
Variant 1
Self-publishing has become a popular way for authors to maintain complete control over their books.
The rise of self-publishing has been driven by the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). KDP allows authors to publish their own books and sell them on Amazon, as well as other retailers. The process is simple and straightforward, and the cost is low.
Self-publishing can be an attractive option for new authors who want to maintain complete control over their work. It also provides an avenue for experienced authors who don’t want to go through the traditional publishing process because they are unhappy with how it could affect their book’s content or quality.
Variant 2
Self-publishing is becoming increasingly popular among authors. It is now possible to publish a book without the help of any publishing house. Authors can now maintain complete control over their books and make all the decisions themselves, including pricing, cover design, and marketing.
The self-publishing industry has grown tremendously in recent years due to the rise of ebooks and digital publishing platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The number of self-published titles has increased from about 200,000 in 2008 to 1.5 million in 2014. In 2015 alone, there were 2 million new self-published titles released on Amazon’s Kindle store alone!
Variant 3
Self-published authors have total control over their work and how it is marketed. They can choose what they want to publish, how much they will charge for it, and who they will market it to.
The process of self-publishing is more cost effective than traditional publishing because there are no middlemen involved. Authors save money on cover design, editing, printing costs etc.
PG notes that this is not deathless prose, but he produced these and more variants in less than a minute. The service also lets you set the tone of the output. PG selected “Convincing” for the variants shown above.
You can see in some of the variants that the program has added facts and information that PG didn’t include in his short seed language. PG presumes that part of the artificial intelligence involves pulling information from the web and elsewhere to allow Rytr to add such relevant information to its output.
Here’s a link to Rytr
Rytr provides free access to its services for original text seeds of up to 125 words. For PG, this is enough to get a flavor of what the service can offer but is obviously a teaser for Rytr’s paid subscription offers, which, for PG, are not that expensive.
PG would be interested to know if any visitors to TPV have any experience using this or any other AI writing tool. Feel free to share your experiences in the Comments to this post or to PG privately via the Contact Me button in menu bar that’s right below the header image.
PG will be sampling some other AI Writing tools over the next few days and will share what he finds.
Actual AI came into existence in the mid 80s, but instead of taking over the world they hang out in the Internet, usually in Twilight blogs writing Fan-Fiction.[1]
It’s good to see them trying to help out students writing school essays. Those examples would make it past any teacher today.
[1] That’s my Story, and I’m sticking to it.
Except, of course, that the point of having students write their own essays is so that… they can learn to write their own essays. It’s not a “cost” for which this is a “substitute”, it’s an opportunity to improve their own skills. Cheat now, or cheat later — not a great choice either way.
The samples were coherent and intelligible. Fascinating.
[see my comment on prior post: https://www.thepassivevoice.com/artificial-intelligence-writing-assistants/#comment-461072 ]
Garbage in, garbage out.
Imagine the feeder data from the internet on anything the least bit controversial such as, say, politics or religion.
Speaking as an inveterate poker-at-technical-things, I wonder whether the masked censorship for general internet sources (“you can’t say that here”) creates a more or less biased dial-a-reality than simply confining the source material to, oh, Wikipedia.
They say Jarvis is the best of the bunch, but they’re all essentially the same, as they’re all based on 2020’s GPT-3 corpus, which itself is based on 175 billion examples of real-world writing. Its presumed successor, GPT-4, is rumored to be 500x times bigger.
“the program has added facts and information” — most of which are fictitious. In my experience I’d say 80% not-real, which makes it kind of useless for actual reported writing, but fine for articles along the lines “What are the 10 best ice cream flavors?” But maybe GPT-4 will improve on that aspect.