Mutiny is among a growing number of startups that use AI to customize sites for specific readers. The company claims its technology learns from user activity and can even rewrite website copy. “Brands can tailor individual messages to customers using the language the customers prefer,” Assaf Baciu, the chief operating officer of Persado, a company that uses AI to generate personalized web copy, told Lifewire in an email interview. “This gives them the ability to scale that’s only possible with AI.”
AI That Targets You
Mutiny recently announced that it raised $50 million of funding, a sign of the growing interest in AI customization. Mutiny’s software plugs into a company’s website, using AI to serve many possible site versions to different users. Among the companies that use the platform is Notion, which makes project management software. “Mutiny has helped us scale our online spend by letting our team quickly build better web experiences without requiring engineers,” Olivia Nottebohm, the chief revenue officer at Notion, said in the news release. One of the primary drivers of personalized content development is a form of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), Baciu said. NLP is enabled by two other key technologies called natural language understanding (NLU) and the engines behind game-changing improvements in how marketing messages are created. “The benefit of using NLG-generated marketing messages and powerful statistical methods is that brands can deliver higher-performing messages (including advertisements) generated by NLG, in addition to understanding how each component performs and which contributes the most to the outcome,” Baciu added.
Content Creators
These days, generating prose can be as easy as turning to AI as your muse. The best-known AI writing tool is GPT-3, software that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It’s so good that some experts warn that it can be hard to tell the difference between AI-generated text and that of a human writer. Arram Sabeti, the founder of ZeroCater, wrote recently on his blog that he was “blown away” by the powers of GPT-3. “It’s far more coherent than any AI language system I’ve ever tried,” Sabeti added. “All you have to do is write a prompt, and it’ll add text it thinks would plausibly follow. I’ve gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. It’s hilarious and frightening.” You can try AI text generation by using tools like Jasper.ai, which is meant to create content for all kinds of businesses. The copywriting software can even mimic various human writing styles. There’s also AI Writer, which is designed to produce original content just from the headlines you give. AI that generates text by itself has grown to be a vital asset to content writers, Mikaela Pisani, the chief data scientist at the web development firm Rootstrap, said in an email interview with Lifewire. But, she added, AI will not advance enough to replace human writers anytime soon. “Where AI currently helps writers is velocity: that initial writer’s block that cripples most is augmented with AI that can generate content variations to help a writer cut down a day-long drafting process into under an hour,” Pisani added. AI writing has gotten so good that it’s hard to tell the difference between sentences crafted by humans, but AI content can be less personalized, monotone, or even be a little boring to read. “However, most ads will be examined by a human employee before it is released, therefore making it hard to see if AI wrote it or not,” Pisani said. “The key here is speed—humans have not been removed from the ad process by AI—but AI enables ad creation at scale. When poor oversight or imperfect data is used, users will be able to discern that an ad has been written by AI. However, when done right, there is little reason for a user to suspect that the ad copy that they encounter on a daily basis was composed by AI.”
