It
was the summer of 1928, when Jawaharlal Nehru began writing letters to his
young daughter, Indira, who was in Mussoorie at that time. In the first letter,
'Book of Nature', he talks about how life began in the universe. When Indira was about to turn 13 in 1930,
Nehru started sending her more detailed letters. These letters contained his
understanding of the world which he wanted to further impart to his daughter.
Long before the invent of SMS, MMS and interesting media apps –
see a Tamil movie of 1970s, love was conveyed only in letters – and they
employed small boys working in tea-shops, dogs, birds and what not ! – to say,
they are in love .. incidentally, have you ever written a love-letter ? or a
letter to your lover ?? – who do you think is the most prolific writer ? (you may find it interesting to know that
most prolific is no human at all !)..
The
answer could depend on what you perceive – some have had very long career in
writing with hundreds of their works getting published. While some best-selling
authors have written a small number of books that have sold millions of copies. To me, Sujatha was the most prolific, capable
of writing on almost everything – then there were Kalki, Chandilyan, Sri
Venugopalan (Pushpa Thangathurai) and others. once in a college, a student slyly asked Sujatha – when would
you stop writing .. ? - the genius,
gently responded – ‘ at night, when I feel sleepy ‘ !!
https://www.behindwoods.com/ - pic credit
In the pure sense, there is nothing greater than our epics – Sri
Ramayana and Maha Barath. The Maha
Barath, the great tale of Bharata dynasty
an epic narrative of the Kurukṣetra War - the fates of
the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes. It also contains the most sacred learning – the
‘Gitopadesam’. Veda Vyāsa is its
author. The Mahābhārata is the longest
epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever
written" as it consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual
verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8
million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the
Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa
“Inflatable duck baby pool with canopy.” “Hot selling colourful
temporary full arm tattoo for men.” “Splendid reusable dog pee pad (minimum
order: 500).” Load up the homepage for e-commerce
giant, Alibaba – a wholesale shopping site that’s more or less China’s answer
to eBay – and you’ll find images and descriptions of anything you could wish to
buy, from kitchen sinks to luxury yachts. Every item has a short headline, but
most are little more than lists of keywords: hand-picked search terms to ensure
this USB phone charger or that pair of flame-resistant overalls float to the
top in a sea of thousands upon thousands of similar items.
It
sounds simple, but there’s an art to this copywriting. Yet Alibaba recently
revealed that it is training an artificial intelligence to generate these item
descriptions automatically – and they’re not the only ones. Over the last few
decades AIs have been taught to compose music, paint pictures and write (bad)
poems. Now they’re writing advertising copy, 20,000 lines of it a second. “Generative
bots are the new chatbot,” says Jun Wang at University College London.
“Generating copy is just one of the applications that can be done.”
Launched
by Alibaba’s digital marketing arm, Alimama, the AI copywriter applies deep
learning and natural-language processing tech to millions of item descriptions
on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao sites to generate new copy of its own. “The tool
removes the inconvenience of having to spend hours seeking design inspiration
by looking at competitor listings and manufacturer sites,” says an Alibaba
spokesperson. “The user can create their ideal copy with just a couple of
clicks.” Despite their forays into the world of art, creating unexciting text
such as ad-copy is where generative systems will have the biggest impact in the
short term. Software will produce millions of words and images that millions of
people will see – and be influenced by – every day. And if they do the job well
enough, we will never even notice the difference.
The
line between human and machine agency is already blurred online. Twitter bots
sow the seeds of misinformation, spambots generate oddly poetic emails about
Viagra, and automatic aggregators find and republish online news articles so
quickly it can be hard to tell who first published what and when. Take the news
about Alibaba’s copywriter. The English version of the press release was picked
up by several news outlets, mainly in the UK, the US and India. But among those
first reports was a video on an obscure YouTube channel called “Breaking News”.
A synthesised voice reads out the news story, with subtitles appearing over a
series of stock images related to Alibaba and ecommerce. Buried in the video’s
description is a link to the text’s source: an article published an hour or so
before by International Business Times, a website based in India.
The
speed and weird sloppiness with which the original story was repurposed – the
subheadings are copied over as if part of the main text – strongly suggest the
video was automatically generated. As does the fact that, apart from the
Alibaba video, the channel seems to post nothing but news reports about
international football, also all republished from other sources. We have news
about one AI churned out by another. Welcome to the future: at once weird and
mundane. Someone may be picking which stories to republish, but no obvious
human activity is visible on the channel or the associated Twitter account. So
we have news about one AI churned out by another. Welcome to the future: at
once weird and mundane.
“It's
not science fiction,” says Wang. He thinks advertising is a perfect fit for
generative AI because it has a clear goal. “You want to maximise the number of
people that click and then buy,” he says. “We’re not talking about generating
art.” According to Alibaba, using its tool is
simple. You provide a link to the item you want a description of and click a
button. “This brings up numerous copy ideas and options,” says the Alibaba
spokesperson. “The user can then alter everything from the length to tone, as
they see fit.” The tool is also prolific. Alibaba claims that it can produce
20,000 lines of copy a second and that it is being used nearly a million times
a day by companies – including US clothing brand Dickies – that want to create
multiple versions of advertisements that still grab our attention when
presented in different sized slots on webpages.
And
it’s not just Alibaba. The company’s main rival JD.com says it is also using
software – which it calls an "AI writing robot” – to generate item
descriptions. According to tech website ZDNet, JD.com’s system can produce more
than 1,000 “pieces of content” a day and has a flair for flowery language,
describing wedding rings as symbolising “holy matrimony drops from the sky”.
The
problem with a machine-learning approach like that used by Alibaba and JD.com
is that the generative system will tend to learn the most average way of saying
things. “AI is really good at generic formats but the more you want to
specialise or customise it becomes a much, much harder problem,” says Riedl. “I
don’t think we’re there yet.” Perhaps not, but it is where we’re heading.
As soon as you load a webpage, the page lets the internet's
ad-brokers know who is visiting and a high-speed bidding war kicks off,
typically involving around 100 advertisers, with the winners getting to show
you their ads. The whole process is over in 100 milliseconds, faster than the
blink of an eye. Google’s trackers operate on
around 75% of the million most popular websites. The three biggest ad networks
– Adsense, Admob and DoubleClick – are run by Google. And there are few places
on the internet that Google cannot track you. Its trackers operate on around
75% of the million most-popular websites. And if Google can’t see you, Facebook
– which has trackers on 25% of those sites - probably can.
Those
trackers record what we search for, what websites we visit and how long we
spend on them. Say someone is interested in shoes and is known to have bought a
particular type of shoe from a particular store. “It is highly probable that you will convert,”
says Wang. “We also estimate, for this type of user in this type of market, how
much to bid in order to win.”
These AI systems are getting smarter but are they getting more
creative? Here’s a famous six-word story by Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby
shoes, never worn.” It’s ad copy, similar to the descriptions churned out by
Alibaba’s AI. But the emotional resonance of Hemingway’s words comes from his
deep understanding of a human life that machines do not have. Even if they
produced those words, we would not react to them in the same way. As well as
telling stories and becoming better salespeople, more creative AIs could also
be used to generate customised campaign emails or social media posts for political
candidates.
Gone
would be the days when people used to blur out in mikes fitted to
auto-rickshaws, with candidate following in open jeep – the auto-speaker would
read out what the campaign manager would want them to speak ! – days were
different when we grew
With
regards – S. Sampathkumar
17.09.2018
~ largely reproduced from an interesting article in BBC
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