In the world we live in today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Be it voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant that simplify tasks or content recommendation engines on Netflix and YouTube that personalize our viewing experience – AI’s influence is profound and ever-growing. AI might lack self-awareness or genuine intelligence, but its proficiency and impact within its designated domains are truly remarkable.
Recently, an AI technology known as chatGPT has gained significant attention, pushing AI even further into the public consciousness. As a type of Large Language Model, chatGPT possesses an uncanny ability to generate human-like text. Trained on vast quantities of internet content, these AI systems utilize a computational model inspired by the human brain’s structure – a neural network.
What makes these large language models, like chatGPT, so powerful is their generative nature. Given a piece of text, they strive to predict the next most likely word. Their understanding is purely statistical, devoid of any specific knowledge about the documents used for training or any ability to search databases or the internet. Despite this, when scaled and trained effectively, the output from these models can be nearly indistinguishable from human-created text.
These large language models are increasingly demonstrating proficiency in a range of tasks. From translating multiple languages to answering complex questions, creating, editing, and classifying content – their capabilities are continually expanding. Additionally, the fusion of these models with data from other sources forms the foundation for the next generation of tools.
ChatGPT is certainly the most renowned model of this kind, but Google Bard and Facebook’s LLama are comparable technologies. Each company has its unique approach, with Facebook notably choosing to make its model’s inner workings externally accessible for research and development purposes.
This technology is not restricted to text generation. For instance, image generation tools like Dall-E/Midjourney can create unique images based on textual descriptions, showcasing the impressive versatility of AI.
Within the publishing industry, AI has started narrating audiobooks, a service now provided by tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as several specialized companies. This technology, while currently imperfect, is rapidly evolving, offering a promising future.
However, the true power of AI becomes evident when these models are accessed programmatically as services by external companies. While tech giants generally own the AI models, other companies, including publishers and publishing technology firms, can build products using them.
Content creation tools such as Jasper, Copy AI, and Sudowrite are prime examples of this, assisting content creators to generate diverse content, from social media posts to entire novels rapidly. Furthermore, Arq works has leveraged chatGPT to create a new service called Insight. This service uses AI to analyze any document and produce industry-standard classification and marketing copy, streamlining the publication process.
AI content creation is no longer a novelty; it’s an established reality. Organizations such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Yahoo!, and the Associated Press have been utilizing AI for years to automate routine news articles and reports.
Given the increasingly sophisticated output from current and future generations of Large Language Models, we can expect the scope of AI-created content to grow rapidly.
As AI continues to shape the publishing industry, it’s crucial to balance the drive for innovation with careful consideration of potential challenges and risks. It’s an exciting journey ahead, filled with opportunities and responsibilities alike. AI in publishing is more than a mere technological revolution; it’s the dawn of a new era.
