Bots will write custom books just for you

Brent Miller
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

The coming age of algorithms that write tailored content on demand

bios [bible]” by Mirko Tobias Schäfer, used under CC BY 2.0

Key points

  • Today, publishers and bloggers survive by tailoring content to small audiences.
  • AI software can write everything from news stories to poetry.
  • Tomorrow, you will read works written by a computer just for you.

Target audiences on the web have narrowed

In 1997, a senior editor at The Economist named Frances Cairncross observed the communications revolution emerging from the internet. Her book “The Death of Distance” predicted thirty trends that would shape global society, all driven by the fact that the internet would remove the barriers of communication that had isolated people throughout history. Twenty years later, many of her prophecies have proven prescient. One foretold the rise of tailored web content:

The power of the computer to search, identify, and classify people according to similar needs and tastes will create sustainable markets for many niche products. Niche players will increase (Cairncross, 1997).

We see this trend in written media. My first post described narrowcasting — the targeting of small audiences by covering specific themes. Some news publishers, for example, produce a collection of small websites and blogs instead of a single, large site. They tailor each to a narrow audience, often covering a single subject in great depth.

My last post explained how online advertisers continue to refine their methods for tracking our every move on the web. I imagined a near future in which online booksellers adapted that technology to develop laser-accurate recommendations for our next read.

Combine those two trends, and we can predict a future where creators customize media for smaller and smaller audiences. As the web’s technology continues to evolve, so will narrowcasting. The next twenty years will see books and blogs narrowcasted to the most narrow of audiences: the individual reader.

The writer in the machine

If you read finance news online, you have probably already read articles written by a computer. The Associated Press uses software like Automated Insight’s Wordsmith to read corporate quarterly earnings reports, extract key facts, then write a news story. It produces thousands of these articles every three months.

These platforms rely on natural language generation, a technology that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to write like a person. Most human writers follow conventions. Sentences follow rules of grammar; news stories follow the Associated Press Stylebook. An editor at a newspaper can construct a template for a news story from these conventions. The program then gathers the facts for a given news item and inserts them into the outline in the correct places. And presto! A finished piece emerges.

These articles often read just like those written by people. In 2014, a Swedish media professor studied how a human audience perceived news articles written either by a journalist or computer. Participants could not tell them apart (Clerwall 2014).

AI software can analyze data, craft a narrative from it, and write that narrative in human language.

A book for an audience of one

A few innovative authors have begun employing natural language generation to write entire books. Millions of them. Economist and author Phil Parker employs algorithms to write a book on a niche subject in about ten minutes. He has written over a million books this way, 100,000 of which you can find on Amazon.

Readers do not buy a book of his because it is the best-written volume on the subject. They buy it because it is often the only volume on the subject. His works focus on tiny topics or on viewing a general topic from a tiny audience’s perspective. Parker has found success by publishing highly narrowcasted books with speed and efficiency.

Now imagine this technology becoming more sophisticated. And combine it with advertisers’ technique of using our browsing history to understand our wants and needs. I predict the next twenty years will see publishers showing you an ad for a book it has not written but thinks you want. If you buy it, the company will use software to write a book in minutes, just for you.

The robot blogger of the future

This coming revolution will not spare blogs. Parker — the author of the million books discussed above — singles out uncreative bloggers as ripe for replacement:

Bloggers… who read three different articles, read a Wikipedia page… those people can be replaced with computer algorithms because they’re doing formulaic work.

Your thoughts?

Agree with my predictions? Disagree? Will bots write what you read in twenty years? Would you enjoy a book or blog written just for you? I would love to read your comments.

Sources

  1. Cairncross, F. (1997). The death of distance. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
  2. Clerwall, C. (2014). Enter the robot journalist: Users’ perceptions of automated content. Journalism Practice, 8, 519–531.

Brent Miller

Written by

Web designer and developer. I teach designers how to code their designs and developers how to prettify their user interfaces. http://brentm.me

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