Can robots replace human writers?
July 18th, 2014 by Bob Bly
It appears that they can, at least as far as content writing is concerned.
According to the article below, Wikipedia “bots” – software that writes without a human operator – write a staggering 10,000 articles a day for the site:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/wikipedia-bot-writes-10000-articles-a-day-140715.htm
The quality is apparently good enough that the articles pass muster – people read them and don’t know a robot wrote them.
Does that mean content writers are obsolete and irrelevant, much like factory workers who have been replaced by robots on factory assembly lines?
For decades, my dad worked in an office building with a manual elevator run by an elevator operator, Frank. The day the building unveiled its new self-service push-button elevator, Frank was gone.
I know a number of older IT professionals who became obsolete and were fired when either their technical skills became outdated or were outsourced to India. Not exactly death by bot, but the same idea.
Do you believe that bots will become powerful enough to handle more sophisticated writing tasks – including poetry, novels, movie scripts, and sales copy?
Just because I cannot see my way clear to believing that what I do as a copywriter can ever be captured in software does not mean that it won’t happen.
What’s scary is the possibility that almost any worker living today may become obsolete in ways he or she never expected.
There are already robots that help perform surgery. Who is to say one day an AI (artificial intelligence) bot won’t eliminate the need for a human surgeon?
Do you feel sorrow for people who are being made obsolete and unemployable by advances in technology or do you see it as their fault: they didn’t keep their skills state of the art, and so they get what they deserve?
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