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martyb writes:

The Pun-Loving Computer Programs that Write Adverts:

"Have a suite stay" read an ad for a hotel offering all-suite rooms. A neat - if obvious - pun you might think.

But what made this ad noteworthy was that it was created by an automated copywriting programme developed by Dentsu Aegis Network, the marketing giant.

The firm launched its natural language generation algorithm last year to increase output after changes were made to Google's advertising system, explains Audrey Kuah, the firm's managing director.

The programme creates 20 to 25 full ads a second in English and is "trained" by feeding it thousands of the kind of ads it is meant to produce, she says.

[...] Google's "cost-per-click-basis" advertising system, whereby the cost of an ad falls the more it is clicked on, encourages clients to play it safe, says Ms Kuah, making the ads rather pedestrian.

[...] So they began to "feed" the algorithm with editorial headlines from travel articles and idioms to see if it could learn "more flowery" language.

[...] "Our ambition is to train this AI [artificial intelligence] copywriter to learn how to inject a little bit of that human creativity, which today is taken out of the search advertising system because it may not be so readily rewarded," she says.

[...] Ms Kuah says the Dentsu Aegis algorithm sometimes gets confused when you give it new information.

"It will start to go haywire," she says. "You will suddenly have things that don't make sense appear. So it's a little bit like teaching a wayward dog that doesn't want to sit."

All the better to manipulate people so they will buy their stuff. Is this how SkyNet will be created?

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