Human writers usually put hours or even days of work to craft a compelling advertising copy for businesses. But that seems to be ending soon.
Chinese digital marketing firm Alimama, an arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, has developed an AI tool that can write 20,000 lines of advertising copy every second. In just a single click of the "Product Smart Copy" button, it can generate multiple ideas based on a link to an existing product page.
Some well-known brands like Dickies and Esprit are now using the tool to adjust the length and tone of the copy, and even determine whether the ads have to be "promotional, functional, fun, poetic or heartwarming."
"For merchants, from today onwards, AI can take care of a portion of their copywriting needs," Alimama said. "And it significantly changes the way (copywriters) work: They will shift from thinking up [a] copy—one line at a time—to choosing the best out of many machine-generated options, largely improving efficiency."
On the average, the tool is used nearly a million times a day by marketers and merchants on Alibaba-owned e-commerce platforms like Taobao, Tmall, Mei.com, and 1688.com.
Threat To Human Writer's Job
Apparently, the AI tool can help save time and unload some work from human writers by merely automating ads. But despite its unmistakable potential, Alibaba maintains that the computer program will not and cannot replace human writers.
Christina Lu, the general manager of Alibaba's marketing arm Alimama, said in a statement on Tuesday, July 3 that human creativity is at the core of the tool and there is no way a programmed system can emulate such.
"All the content produced by the AI Copywriter is the result of applying deep learning models, trained with large volumes of quality content created by humans. Human creativity is the cornerstone of the machine, which isn't able to replace the creativity of people. AI for marketing...allows people to devote more energy to richly creative work."
As Alibaba Group co-founder and executive chairman Jack Ma had said, AI-powered technologies were not developed to threaten the human workforce but to make them human partners.
