while we move further into the 21st century, more and more aspects of our lives are controlled by algorithms. Facebook determines which posts we see in our news feed, Google shows us the results of our searches based on their complex ranking system, and Amazon recommends products based on our past purchase history. It’s no wonder, then, that online marketing is increasingly reliant on algorithms to create effective copywriting. So what does the future hold for the web: will marketing be dominated by machines, or will human creativity always be necessary? Read on to find out…
No one wrote that intro. It was generated by software from the copywriting service Jasper, inspired by the headline of this article. The first suggestion was too brief and lacked details. The second, reproduced verbatim above, caused an editor to exclaim that she’d gotten worse texts from professional writers.
Jasper can also generate content tailored to Facebook ads, marketing emails, and product descriptions. It’s part of a series of startups that have adapted a text-generation technology known as GPT-3 from the artificial intelligence company OpenAI to fuel one of the oldest needs on the web: creating marketing copy that clicks wins and ranks high on Google.
Marketing line generation has emerged as one of the first large-scale use cases for text generation technology, taking a leap forward in 2020 when OpenAI announced the commercial version of GPT-3. Jasper alone claims more than 55,000 paid subscribers, and OpenAI says one competitor has more than 1 million users. WIRED counted 14 companies that openly offer marketing tools that can generate content such as blog posts, headlines and press releases using OpenAI’s technology. Their users talk about algorithm-driven writing as if it will soon become as ubiquitous as automatic spell checking.
“I’m a terrible writer and this makes it a lot easier to put together relevant content for Google,” said Chris Chen, founder of InstaPainting, which uses a network of artists to turn photos into inexpensive paintings. He uses a copywriting service called ContentEdge to help write pages on topics like pet portraiture. The service uses technology from OpenAI and IBM along with internal software and describes the product as “fast, affordable and almost human”.
ContentEdge, like many of its rivals, works like a conventional online text editor, but with extra features you won’t find in Google Docs. In a sidebar, the software can suggest keywords needed to rank high on Google for a chosen title. Clicking a button marked with a lightning bolt will generate full paragraphs or suggested outlines for an article from a title and a short summary. The text contains terms that come from pages that rank highly on Google.
Chen likes the way the resulting paragraphs sometimes contain information drawn from the billions of words of online text used to train OpenAI’s algorithms. That it does so in ways that can be distorted or contradictory doesn’t deter him. “You shouldn’t use the output outright, but it’s a starting point for editing and does the tedious work of researching things,” he says.
ContentEdge and its competitors generally advise users to edit and review content before posting. While OpenAI’s technology usually produces original text, it can re-spit text from its training data scraped from the web. Jasper and some other companies offer plagiarism checks to reassure customers that they are not accidentally copying existing text.
