To AI or Not AI?
Unfortunately now, the choice has been made for you. It’s AI. No matter where you work, what you do. AI is going to settle in every nook and cranny it can. As we say, the writing is on the wall.
Fortunately, it’s a great thing to have happened. Especially if you’re in the publishing industry.
SIDEBAR: We told you so in our latest webinar dated September 13, 2023. In case you didn’t attend or didn’t know about it, here’s the webinar recording so you can check it out whenever you have a moment free.
In it, our VP, International Partnerships, Chad Hussain, and our COO, Ramalingam S, talked at length about how AI-powered News CMS is the next stop on newsroom transformation journey. We also talked about AI-driven features at play within Quintype News CMS currently and our development roadmap over the next 6 months.
Surprised?
You shouldn’t be. After all, Gartner says Generative AI has achieved peak hype currently.
Gartner also says that 25% of all internet content will be created by AI in the next few years.
And not just content. Entire enterprises may be established, run and managed with the help of Generative AI.
As if on cue, Europol goes further with a prediction that 90% of all online content by 2026 may be synthetically generated. Here’s Gartner talking about the issue in a Twitter thread. At Quintype, as Chad Hussain, our VP of International Business said during our webinar, “The truth may lie somewhere in between’.
Regardless of the numbers, however, publishers agree that chatGPT and its contemporaries are probably one of the most significant technology events of the century. They put it in the same league as the invention of the internet and the printing press.
Generative AI or GenAI is a technology that has the power to transform our nature of work. It can recognise, analyse, and learn the patterns and structure of a data set to generate new data with similar characteristics.
In terms of content creation, it can help you analyse, iterate, and synthesize new work based on its training data. It can do this with lightning speed.
Because of this, it is changing the way content is created, curated, and distributed the world over. We’ve been seeing these changes in the coming for at least a decade now, with world’s leading publications coming up with their own ‘intelligent’ systems to automate these tasks.
Bloomberg has its Cyborg, The Washington Post its Heliograph, Forbes has a Bertie, The Globe and Mail are assisted by Sophi… and many more are set to follow.
49% of newsrooms are already using GenAI tools
67% are using AI to some extent, according to Reuters Institute Report
70% see it as a helpful tool for the newsroom
82% newsrooms predict a change in their roles and responsibilities are coming.
Leaders across various industries understand that these changes will be sweeping as well as pivotal. Which leads us to the very nub of the problem most people have with AI-related technologies. It is…
Change.
You see, among the 49% of newsrooms that are using GenAI tools, the number of journalists using GenAI is a meagre 0-15%. Which highlights a bigger problem.
Journalists are lagging in the adoption of AI tools, relatively speaking.
Most people are skeptical of the impact of AI with regard to issues such as quality, accuracy, and factual integrity of the content as well as job security of people in the publishing, media and content creation industry.
Then there are those who are doubtful of the workforce’s ability to skill up in time to implement these changes across the board, as they will be required in the near future.
In fact, we found that some of the top publisher concerns tend to be:
The value exchange needed in training the AI
Continuing struggle to understand exactly who would be the key beneficiary of the use of AI in publishing: is it the audience or the publisher?
Increased vulnerability to fallacies and inaccuracies while operating under pressure to publish
Lack of internal organisational systems as well as industry bodies to identify and stem the misuse of AI
Job security
It’s not just that we have seen our clients and industry members relay these concerns time and again. Our webinar participants echoed the same concerns even as they confirmed that publishers are increasingly using AI for key publishing tasks.
And therefore, may be it’s time to recognise that:
Workflow management: When journalists, editors, and creators use News CMSes equipped with AI capabilities, they automate mundane, repetitive tasks such as archiving, formatting, scheduling and more. It helps them to move to more substantive work and collaborate more freely. It also gives better visibility to the team members and therefore, manage their time and resources more effectively.
Speed: Whatever repetitive tasks humans can do, AI can do them a million times faster and with greater accuracy. As long as the AI training data set is appropriate. It’s an advantage worth acquiring for today’s businesses because in the publishing and content or media creation business, being the first one to talk about a topic or story can make or break your success.
Ensuring quality, integrity, and exercising good judgement: AI is far from perfect when it comes to exercising good judgement, spotting or weeding out bias, and understanding and replicating the tone, nuance, or quality of a piece or communication. And that is just as well because these are inherently human qualities.
It means only humans can perform tasks that require these abilities. AI doesn’t come close to doing it. That’s not saying it may never do so in the future but even if it does, it will need a human to moderate its performance and evaluate its outcomes.
This is why AI cannot take away all the jobs. Journalists and editors as well as creators perform a crucial task of combining their intuition with cultural experience and understanding, to create and present stories that evoke a range of emotions among their audiences. This also happens to be a task that is business critical and has a major impact on the revenue of the business.
They should be doing more of this and less of those mundane, repetitive tasks we have mentioned before.
That is why our team of leaders at Quintype are convinced that GenAI is the modern journalist’s best friend. For me, that includes editors, bloggers, vloggers, creators and content or media publishing businesses of all types.
We didn’t stop there, however. Our COO, Ramalingam S followed this up with a demo of Quintype’s AI features that our 200+ clients are currently benefiting from. You can sign up for the product demo here.
These are:
AI-led Paraphrasing: AI paraphrases large and chunky texts to provide you with summaries that help you and your readers with quick, skimmable takeaways, increasing the usability of your content.
AI-generated titles (for SEO optimisation): AI analyses user data to synthesise headlines, sub-titles, meta tags and more based on the understanding of open rates, user engagement stats, to create titles that work best with the search engines. Helping you to optimise for SEO.
AI-led Push notifications: AI suggests push notification summary of your content by analysing user data preferences and other trends. It makes a time consuming job data-driven and easy.
AI-led Intelligent prompts: AI completes your sentences for you by providing suitable alternatives, thus making that first draft an effortless triumph.
AI-driven Translation: Our automated translation tool allows you to translate text across any languages at a mere click.
Intelligent search: Gone are the days of readymade elasticsearch. Now we’re using AI-driven semantic search that brings to you content based on keywords and phrases.
All of these features are trained at helping publishers and content creation businesses as well as teams raise their newsroom efficiency in multiples.
We see it as a big win for writers and creators who always wish they could write and create more. And in better ways.
And, be known for their best work.