General

The future of automated content

With content creation being much needed on the Internet, human writers get occupied in filling webpages with articles that conform to certain standards set by search engines. Since there are not enough human writers who can meet the demanding requirement of the Internet’s wide sphere, then came automated content generators, the machine equivalent of human content writers, such as, the SEO Content Machine.

Content generator capabilities

SCM has an optimal application as it is good at generating insightful and comprehensive reports without the understanding and time needed for a human writer on a similar task. It can even squeeze in idioms and emotive interjections to spice the rather dry reporting of facts. It goes especially well with producing numerical data.

Videogames for example, provide pages with statistics, which tells how many coins the gamer already collected, hours taken in solving a problem, or steps taken.

Two leaders of automated content generation – Narrative Science, with its automated narrative generator, Quill, and Automated Insights, leverage their ability to turn raw data into a written content recognizable by humans.

Machine vs humans

How do content generators measure up with human writers, or how the machine-produced content fares with human-written content? In his Enter the Robot Journalist study by Christer Clerwall, a professor from Sweden, readers generally found it tough to identify which content is written by human, and which by a software.

Though machine writers can equate the ability of humans to write objectively and in detail, readers find it boring. Human writers still come better with coming up with content that are eloquent and enjoyable. Robots cannot just match the flexibility, analysis and creativity or human-authored content.

When The Guardian used artificial intelligence to come up with an article on a certain gluten-free grain, the output had a lot of room to improve, even though it was entertaining.

Leveraging automated content

Yet, automated content is still not bad. First, using it gives entrepreneurs the chance to expand the potential output of their business. In fact, many companies are already eagerly seizing the opportunity by utilizing the tool.

The future automated content may come along with:

  • Quality content
  • White hat content tools
  • Non-English contents
  • Humans producing their content and using tools to mash content around and insert links

Thus, should human writers start changing careers? Automated content can be spun in a positive tone. For example, in a sports niche, there is much data more than all sports writers combined can report until they become stale. If the content generators are utilized of scanning huge sports information and generate comprehensive reports, human journalists have more rooms for more engaging content.

With Clerwall’s study showing the readers still value human-written content, it is something automated content machines, like SCM, has yet to master.

The next big thing

Technology has always been dynamic. In the digital world of journalism, the current technology may not be at par with sophisticated levels of reporting yet, but it is providing food for thought as to where the direction of automated content should go.

There is still a rapid interest in automated content generation. This new form of content creation will be the next big thing of digital publishing. Narrative Science Co-Founder Kristian Hammond claimed, 15 years ahead, 90 percent of the news would be from automated content generator.

Meanwhile, you can always try out SCM for free today, so click here to get a no obligation trial.

Image courtesy of The Italian VoiceFlickr