Does AI replace the editor?

The Internet has been awash with articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the disruption it portends to have across most, if not all industries. When you think of AI, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the machines that run our homes and cars and so on.

However, the next generation of AI is reshaping the way readers access content, and it’s almost impossible to believe that this new technology could replace publishers entirely. In fact, it’s more likely that AI will be used in concert with publishers and other media outlets to create more personalised experiences for readers. We have already seen nascent use of this, for example with Netflix, which personalises and curates, as it were, movies for you, once it has figured out your viewing preferences.

Content is about to get personal, as AI starts to understand the audience better
AI will be able to understand audience preferences. As such,  it will be able to serve them better. For example, if a publisher has an audience that likes sports and another one that prefers travel and food, the AI can help the publisher create content that’s tailored for each group.

AI is also great at finding new audiences for publishers’ brands. If a brand does not have much reach on social media but has hundreds of millions of followers on YouTube or Instagram (or even Snapchat), then an AI could potentially find them through these platforms and give them access to their own platform without having any employees do it manually.

Publishers are already using AI to address the challenges of content management
We’ve all seen the examples of AI-powered content management systems: Google Translate, for example, is a service that uses machine learning to translate text from one language into another. The same technology can be used to automate repetitive tasks—like automatic formatting of documents and emails—and even analysing data-sets to find new insights about our readers’ preferences or behaviours. In fact the COVID-19 pandemic increased the use of AI across many publishing houses.

The key benefit here is that publishers can focus on what they do best: producing quality content for their audience(s) while automating as much work as possible.

AI can help publishers with content curation and distribution
AI can also help publishers with content curation and distribution. In this case, the AI will be able to identify the most relevant content for their audience and distribute it in a more efficient way.

AI is shaping the way readers access content, but it’s not eliminating the human touch from the publishing process entirely
AI is reshaping the way readers access content, but it’s not eliminating the human touch from the publishing process entirely. AI can help publishers with content curation and distribution by identifying high-quality articles and helping to distribute them across multiple platforms. It can also help with content management by automating processes like managing metadata and file types (for example, PDFs).

It can also help with content personalisation: algorithms can be used to recommend specific stories or topics based on an individual’s preferences or previous purchasing history; this type of personalisation has been around in some form since before we encountered Google search results (which are based on user profiles), but AI makes these systems much more sophisticated than ever before. In addition to recommending different kinds of products—like books or music albums—it might suggest new authors whose work you’d enjoy reading as well!

Conclusion
While we may be at the beginning of a new era for publishing, human interaction and the power of storytelling continues to something that only (real) human beings do. AI will never replace the content editor. AI is not a generic tool. It is a decision-making software based on the information it has and on the questions that we ask.

Accordingly, AI can only be as good as the information that it is fed and the questions it uses to select items to present. For example, while you may use an AI assistant at a certain level, you’ll need human input in order to create content that’s not only relevant but effective.