Can You Spot The Bot?

Did you miss B&T’s latest print edition? Make sure you don’t miss the next one by subscribing here. The below article appeared in our October issue and is an example of some of the cracking content you’ll find in the B&T magazine. 

Of the six articles below, only one has been crafted by one of our soon-to-be-defunct (human) writers. Can you spot the human touch in this tsunami of automated nonsense? Although the answer was curiously missing from our print edition (let’s blame the robots), you can find it at the bottom of this article.

Option 1

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality, after the company earlier this year signed a five-year deal with an AI startup Persado, which specialises in writing marketing copy. After months of testing, the company found Persado’s automated copy actually garnered higher click rates than its human writers could. In fact, in some cases the AI more than doubled the humans.

Option 2

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality. Indeed, as the number of new bots rises, so do the number of writers hired. JPMorgan has begun to leverage the new, sophisticated tools provided by artificial intelligence to provide its writers with more autonomy: “Since our new tools will make us smarter, I expect we’ll see increased use, especially by the writers on our digital teams, to push for better technology.”

Option 3

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality due to its huge marketing team of nearly 30,000 writers and experts. In this way, banks in many industries can avoid the need to hire humans, while still retaining the value of their writers and human managers. At the same time, AI could also become the new cost structure for some industries, allowing machines to compete on cost and quality with humans.

Option 4

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality, with the recent addition of two hundred thousand bots to its system. By the end of the financial year, the bank expects to have written over one billion sentences for bots and algorithms. The bank’s recent introduction of more than one thousand bots, which make up an entire human voice bank, is only the highest-profile of a slew of new bots and automated programs being used to manage their writing staff.

Option 5

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality. “For this type of business, automation just isn’t feasible at the moment,” said Peter Nijboer, senior director at the Nijboer Group, which runs one of the largest hedge funds in the world. “But soon it will be.” “There’s no place to go for quality, long-form writing,” said Peter Wertheim, CEO of the Wertheim & Associates consulting company that specializes in technology-related roles. “The cost of hiring a writer and the expense of developing a human-readable manuscript is prohibitive.”

Option 6

Are copywriters at risk of being replaced by AI? As the quality of automated writing improves, it will become increasingly viable for businesses to outsource their writers for bots and algorithms. For global finance goliath JPMorgan Chase & Co., this is now a reality. “It’s all around us,” says Ben Horowitz, CEO of the new venture capital firm Accelerando. “We now have these tools that are just really effective.” Yet the rise of the computerized writer has also fueled a backlash from writers. “I see the same writing patterns [on] the Internet as the writing I did in my typewriter,” says Susan Sontag. Many readers, she says, “will not accept a computer in the same space as a writer.”

The answer? Option 1 is the human.