I’m trying to parse this some other way, but Digiday is sure making it seem like this “topic prompter/rough draft creator” software is a step towards programming a machine to replace a thinking employee’s work:
Over the summer, the business publisher, which just had its most profitable year in more than a decade, rolled out a new CMS, called Bertie, which recommends article topics for contributors based on their previous output, headlines based on the sentiment of their pieces and images too. It’s also testing a tool that writes rough versions of articles that contributors can simply polish up, rather than having to write a full story from scratch.
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Bertie is part of a broader focus on using artificial intelligence to make publishing more efficient for Forbes staff, and to make it as easy as possible for visitors to consume multimedia content on Forbes’ sites, said Forbes Media’s new chief digital officer, Salah Zalatimo. “Anything we can do to make it easier and smarter to publish,” said Zalatimo, who previously served as Forbes’ svp of product and technology. “That’s the loyalty we bring [our contributors].”
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The tools are not designed to produce something that a contributor or reporter would feel comfortable publishing as is. Instead, Zalatimo said, they are more like thought-starters, designed to get contributors’ creative juices flowing. That’s partly a function of artificial intelligence’s limitations, and partly because reporters and contributors would rather make the pieces their own.
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My main observation: “Rather” tends not to live long in the profit-oriented workplace.