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Algorithms are controlling more and more parts of our lives as we progress through the twenty-first century. Facebook chooses which posts appear on our newsfeed, Google displays the results of our searches using a complex ranking algorithm, and Amazon suggests things based on our previous purchases. It’s no surprise, then, that algorithms are increasingly used in online marketing to generate excellent content. So, what does the future hold for the internet—will machines take over marketing, or will human innovation always be required?
That introduction was not written by a person. It was inspired by the headline of this post and generated by software from the copywriting service Jasper. The first suggestion was overly succinct and lacking in specificity. The second, which is reprinted above verbatim, prompted the editor to declare that he had never received worse material from professional writers.
Jasper can create content for Facebook advertising, marketing emails, and product descriptions, among other things. It’s one of a slew of firms that have repurposed OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generation technology to satisfy one of the internet’s oldest desires: writing marketing copy that attracts clicks and ranks well on Google.
Marketing lines creation has proven to be one of the first large-scale use cases for text-generation technology, which advanced in 2020 when OpenAI revealed the commercial version of GPT-3. Jasper alone has over 55,000 paying customers, while OpenAI boasts that one of its competitors has over a million users. We’ve found 14 companies openly offering marketing tools that use OpenAI’s technology to generate content such as blog posts, headlines, and press releases. Their users talk about algorithm-driven writing as if it will become as common as automatic spell-checking in the near future.
“I’m a lousy writer, and this makes it a lot easier for me to put together relevant content for Google,” says Chris Chen, founder of Instapainting, which turns images into low-cost paintings using a network of artists. He utilises ContentEdge, a copywriting agency, to help him develop articles on topics like how to commission pet pictures. The service combines OpenAI and IBM technology with in-house software to provide a “fast, inexpensive, and almost human” product, according to the company.
ContentEdge, like many of its competitors, works like a standard online text editor but adds functionality that Google Docs lacks. The software can recommend keywords needed to rank highly on Google for a given title in a sidebar. From a title and a brief summary, a lightning bolt button generates whole paragraphs or proposed outlines for an article. The text comprises phrases culled from Google’s top-ranked pages.
ContentEdge is distinct as the final paragraphs include information gleaned from the billions of words of internet material that OpenAI’s algorithms were trained on.Before uploading, ContentEdge and its competitors recommend that users update and fact-check their content. Although OpenAI’s technology is most typically used to generate original content, it can also regurgitate text found in its web-based training data. Customers can use plagiarism checkers from Jasper and other organisations to ensure they aren’t unwittingly replicating preexisting text.
Spammers and social bots have tarnished auto-generated text, but businesses developing marketing tools based on GPT-3 say that it may help people improve their writing skills and the web as a whole. ContentEdge’s founder, Ryan Bednar, claims that his service helps businesses develop more meaningful content and distribute it to the proper individuals. “Google is the internet’s entryway,” he says. “I don’t think we’re attempting to game the system; we’re trying to help small businesses and writers get discovered.”
Publishers should avoid “automatically created content intended to manipulate search rankings,” according to Google’s guidelines. The suggestion dates back to at least 2007, and it was inspired by rudimentary software that tries to improve a page’s search score by adding extensive lists of keywords or swapping synonyms into text copied from elsewhere.
Joshua Logan, the cofounder of Rainbow Lasers, pays $60 a month for Copysmith, a text-generation service he has used to populate customers’ websites and discover the proper words to describe the fragrance of a new marijuana product. He makes a point of telling clients about his usage of the technology and has established personal boundaries half-jokingly. “When my fiancée and I communicate with one other, we never use AI,” Logan explains.
The latest chapter in Google’s long and tumultuous relationship with online advertising may result in text generated by computers and polished by humans being omnipresent. According to Dirk Lewandowski, a professor of search engines at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, as Google’s algorithms have improved at detecting whether a page has detailed and coherent text that might answer a searcher’s question, the volume of hastily produced blog posts and articles created in an effort to boost sites’ search rankings has exploded. “We’ve seen a lot of terrible stuff created in the previous couple of years because individuals aren’t paid well to write it,” he says. “Perhaps this is the next logical step.”
“It made motivation-killing labour, like tedious, cut-and-paste data entry, a drudgery of the past,” says RPA’s creator,
What is the next step for RPA? It’s all about the process. The new normal is hastening the drive for digital transformation, with the goal of delivering streamlined, frictionless experiences that delight both customers and staff. RPA is being used for a number of systems within businesses as part of this progression.
RPA expertise is increasingly being applied to higher-value initiatives, such as business workflow transformation. “Workflows are an organization’s secret sauce – end-to-end processes that encode how it does things smarter, faster, better, and cheaper.”
For forward-thinking businesses, the future lies in combining RPA automation capabilities with complementary technologies such as process orchestration and document intelligence to automate mission-critical business procedures. In addition, there is a shift toward using more low-code capabilities, allowing citizen developers to create automation and cooperate with professional developers to accelerate their digital workflow transformation journey.
Automated Intelligence
RPA is slowly but surely becoming a part of a larger corporate ecosystem that involves both human and non-human activity. RPA has helped enterprises across many industries to enhance efficiencies, streamline internal and customer-facing procedures, and, perhaps most crucially, free up highly-skilled personnel from repetitive, low-value work during the last five years or so.
“Now that the technology has matured and the early-adopter stage has passed, businesses are seeking for more.” A seamless blend of digital workers, human workers, and ever-evolving technologies will be seen.
To put it another way, intelligent automation is becoming ever more intelligent.
Intelligent automation, which combines RPA technology with AI capabilities, has the potential to become a strategic lever for wide-scale transformation, innovation, and competitive differentiation, according to business leaders. Organizations begin with their grand goal in mind and work backwards from there. We’ll start to see a considerable number of companies adopting this automation-first strategy.
RPA can ultimately benefit businesses as a whole since it frees up human employees to do what they do best: think creatively and solve issues. RPA is evolving to become ever more democratised, allowing automation’s potential to alter the way humans work to be realised at scale. “As more low-code and no-code solutions become available, users with less tech skills will be able to take advantage of the technology’s potential to improve their workloads.
The more people who can benefit from automation, the closer their firm gets to being a fully automated enterprise, instead of relying on IT support, they can create their automation apps that make sense to their specific responsibilities.
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Tarun Taunk
Editor-In-Chief
