Alibabaโs AI Copywriting Tool Can Produce Up To 20,000 Lines Of Copy A Second
Alimama, the digital marketing arm of Chinese e-commerce operator, Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) copywriting tool that can produce 20,000 lines of copy a second. This AI-copywriter is expected to help merchants on its retail sites produce product information without the help of humans.
According to Alimama, โcopywriting involves a certain degree of repetitive, low-value work that can beย made more efficient.โ The company said the technology could โtake care of a portion of their copywriting needsโ.
According to the company, the AI-copywriter tool, which uses deep learning and natural language processing technologies to produce copies, has successfully passed the Turing Test during which a computer could imitate a human sufficiently well so that another human could not distinguish the difference.
For instance,ย fashion chain Esprit and Texas clothing brand Dickies are already using the Chinese-language tool.
Shaozhang Ding,ย e-Commerce Head for the Asia Pacific market at Esprit, said, โThe AI copywriter is a really amazing tool. Based on a massive database of existing copy and advanced AI technologies, the tool can reduce the repetitive and tedious copywriting workload for our teams.โ
To access the tool, Alibaba said brands and advertisersย can insert a link to any product page and click the โProduce Smart Copyโ button to see multiple copy ideasโ from which to select from.
The machine learning AI offers the options to tweak the length and tone of the copies depending upon the intent of the advertisers. It can produce copies having the tone as โpromotional, functional, fun, poetic or heartwarming.โ However, there is no clarity when other language versions of the product will be available.
โThe tool is used on average nearly a million times per day, by merchants and marketers on Alibaba-owned sites such as Taobao, Tmall,ย Mei.comย (a fashion flash sale website) andย 1688.comย (Alibabaโs Chinese-language wholesale buying site),โ the company said.
โAnd it significantly changes the way [copywriters] work: They will shift from thinking up copy โย one line at a time โ to choosing the best out of many machine-generated options, largely improving efficiency.
โAs with design, copywriting involves a certain degree of repetitive, low-value work that can be made more efficient. A single product might require up to 10 versions of copy for different ad formats, like posters, web banners, product pages and other special event pages.โ
While trying to explain the role for humans once the AI was employed, Alimama general manager of marketing Christina Lu said: โHuman creativity is the cornerstone for the machine, which isnโt able to replace the creativity of people. AI for marketing allows people to devote more energy to richly creative work.โ
This is not the first time that such the Chinese e-commerce giant has launched an AI-powered tool to help small to mid-sized businesses on Alibabaโs e-commerce platforms. In April this year, Alibaba had released a smart banner designer tool that could resize and reformat website ad banners automatically or with the slide of a mouse. Additionally, the company had also created an AI-poweredย video editing tool to help merchants excerpt key text and images from a product page to generate 20-second promotional videos that they can include on their listings.
Source: Mumbrella Asia