A.I. Won’t Replace Writers — It Will Maximize Their Storytelling Potential
Historically, writing has been a craft best fulfilled by humans. As personal touch and nuance are often seen as prerequisites for great writing, it can be difficult to imagine robots, or more specifically augmented intelligence (A.I.), capable of doing it convincingly, much less meaningfully.
When it comes to A.I.’s integration into the workforce, much of the public discourse is rooted in fears of job displacement. Because of this, wary workers often overlook the technology’s potential to make their jobs easier. This holds true for writers, too — while A.I. may not be able to write long-form stories just yet, it can still be used as a powerful assistant for writers across disciplines.
In most professions, including communications and journalism, talented workers are weighed down by time-consuming tasks that, when experienced together, add up to “mindless” work. For journalists, this can entail churning out rote coverage that consistently follows the same model, such as monthly earnings reports. For PR professionals, this can include crafting hundreds of similar pitches.
A.I. tools have the power to simplify these tasks by writing simple stories and streamlining menial tasks, allowing professionals to seamlessly develop content and take on more complex, higher-value tasks. In the field of PR, A.I. can analyze past reporter behavior to determine what specific outlets and reporters are likely to find a story interesting. A.I. can even predict a pitch’s potential to land. Before this kind of technology, PR professionals had to assess whether a reporter would write a story by relying on a combination of professional experience, instinct and labor-intensive research – all without performance-based data. Technology can also serve as an important resource for crisis and issues mitigation, as it can forecast how likely reporters are to engage with sensitive news, as well.
When drafting a longer-form story, A.I. can help jumpstart the writing process – freeing up time for tasks best suited for humans, such as storytelling. Something A.I. doesn’t yet have is a sense of narrative – the latent meaning beyond the data that resonates with an audience. With A.I. in the picture, the value of the human skills becomes more valuable, much in the same way that mass-produced cars have made handcrafted luxury cars more valuable. Thus, handcrafted, skilled writing will become increasingly more valuable, granting the writers who possess it the recognition they deserve.
PRophet is the first-ever A.I.-driven platform, built by and for PR professionals, to use a proprietary combination of natural language processing and machine learning to predict media interest and story sentiment before you ever send a pitch.
Portions of this article were informed by a previously published article by Coruzant Technologies (authored by Aaron Kwittken), which you can read here.
