The Future Is Here - And We Know Nothing About It - Artificial Intelligence

[andrewfi]

Artificial Intelligence wrote the quoted text!

How To Spend A Weekend In Tallinn

Tallinn is a great place to be from the moment you arrive. From the historic Old Town with its cobbled streets and Gothic churches to the enchanting forested areas of Kadriorg Park, Tallinn's green spaces offer an escape from the urban crowds.

With Estonia’s Baltic Sea location, an archipelago of forested islands and the chance to combine the best of both worlds (city and countryside), Tallinn is a destination that’s never short of surprises.

Here is a short guide to Estonia's cosmopolitan capital, a must-see destination for both tourists and locals. From cultural activities and museums to traditional markets and the medieval Old Town, there's plenty to do in this city of cobbled streets and Baltic charm.

Things to do in Tallinn The city's official tourism website has a comprehensive list of places to go and things to do in Tallinn. Here are our top picks:

1 Visit the Old Town One of the best ways to get a feel for Tallinn is to take a stroll through its old town. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it has been inhabited since medieval times. Today, its narrow streets are lined with historic buildings that house galleries and museums.

2. St Nicholas' Church There's an old saying in Estonia that you can't understand a city without understanding its churches. St Nicholas' Church, the biggest and oldest church in Tallinn, was built in 1340 and is still one of the city's main attractions.

3. Museum of Estonian Architecture This museum contains the largest collection of Estonian architecture outside Estonia, with more than 2,000 items from over 1,000 different structures. Among the highlights are a magnificent wooden church from the early 20th century, and the former home of architect Mart Laar. You can also see the former residence of composer Jean Sibelius.

4. Take a walking tour As the capital of Estonia, Tallinn has a lot of history.

Learn about this on a guided tour. Tours are available in English and you can book them at https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/see-do/things-to-do/tours
 

As many of you know, I make a significant part of my income from writing, specifically marketing copywriting.
I also do informational writing on a wide range of topics in formats ranging from white papers, presell articles, blog posts and informational articles.

As a person whose revenue comes from the time it takes to actually research and write stuff, it is hard to leverage that time. Basically, I end up charging for my time with a premium for skill. From a business perspective one is always looking for ways to get more money per unit of time spent working.

I have several tools that I use to enhance my work rate and the quality of the content I can produce. Over the past year or so, Artificial Intelligence has become more prominent in that work. For example, content research and fact-checking, content targeting, helping me to find relevant images for content, creating tags for content, proofreading, tone and voice control and more.

One area that has not seen many benefits has been writing. A few months ago, in order to help out a long-standing client, I took on the task of writing product descriptions for his site. A boring, low-value task. I wanted to find a way to do the job faster and than I could do through normal effort.

A couple of years ago I came across tools that claimed to write copy using AI. They were pretty useless. However, I had become aware that some prominent sites were using AI to create some of their content. News sites are prominent, but unsung users of this technology.
I licensed a couple of tools to see if they could assist me in writing these very short pieces of text. To my surprise, they could. I was able to save at least 50% of my time and write a greater variety of descriptions and repaid my investment in just a few days. These are descriptions that actually sell the products they describe.

I have been giving these tools a workout on other projects. The text at the top of this post was entirely generated by AI. It took just a few seconds to do after setting up the requirements for the piece. The information is factually correct, the weblink I edited as it went to an obsolete page and I altered the text formatting slightly.

The future is here! While the piece pasted at the top is not perfect, it will take only a few seconds to knock it into shape. In my opinion, most people would accept it as it stands.

[Lord of the Dance]

Definitely better than a few years ago. I remember reading something similar but it read like a drunk toddler's ad-lib. 

If AI continues to develop at this pace it would seem it won't be too long before it's entirely indistinguishable from something written and edited by human hands. Thank goodness computers don't have use for money on their own. 

[andrewfi]

Yes, automated writing tools a few years ago were pretty bad. They were not AI driven, or at least not the ones I checked out, although sometimes vendors made claims that they were. Often they used Markov Chaining and similar algorithms and automated word replacement to generate readable but meaningless text useful only for spammy backilinking projects.

There is still plenty of room for improvement overall, I won't bore anyone with the shortcomings. But skill still has a place. However, I can see that very quickly these tools will disaggregate the lowest levels of content creators.

One thing I have been noticing is that low level creators, or more accurately their employers - agencies and boiler rooms - are buying into the same tools I use.

They have a problem with in that the writers often do not have good English language skills and thus the content they write is very poor. However, the AI tools do these people few favours because unless one is pretty fluent and able to frame ideas quite well the AI tools fall over their own feet. This is something I am seeing in client forums at the moment.

I quite like these tools though. They can expand my reach and enable me to do better quality work in some areas.

[Markje]

Definitely better than a few years ago. I remember reading something similar but it read like a drunk toddler's ad-lib. 

If AI continues to develop at this pace it would seem it won't be too long before it's entirely indistinguishable from something written and edited by human hands. Thank goodness computers don't have use for money on their own.

You forget the word "artificial" in Artificial intelligence. The word is there for a reason and its not what most people think. It does not imply the intelligence is computer-based or in some way not a living person. The word means that the intelligence in question does not possess the skill to create, only to select and combine earlier inputted data. Now it can seem very smart and almost like it has a mind of its own, but right now its still just a program mimicking what it has been taught.

[andrewfi]

Oh, yes, it's about patterns, that's a big part of the skill of making the most of the tool I use.

But don't underestimate what's going on.
One of the most significant aspects of human intelligence is the ability to recognise patterns and draw inferences from them.

What's creativity? In this context, it is words, ideas and facts put together to create a new work that did not exist before. The facts in the piece are researched, just as I would do. The words are unique. Those words have never been written in that way ever in history.

Perhaps not the apex of creativity, but neither is it the nadir.

In the piece above, I used what is called in the software, a framework. That's a set of texts used to describe the 'shape' of the content. Usually trained on just a few samples of the type of output desired. I can make my own frameworks in a matter of minutes. Then to get similar content for any destination I just give the thing a rough title to inform the software of the location and purpose. In this case A Weekend In Tallinn. Click a button and a few seconds later comes the introduction. Then I just expand the text, format it and check facts.

I didn't finish the project as I wanted to share with you the unvarnished text.

For more complex tasks I use 'workflows' which at their heart are concatenated frameworks.

There's folks creating long form fiction, poetry and more.

One of the tools I am using is currently creating over 5 million words of unique content a day.

When I write, I am always standing on the shoulders of giants. I use swipe files, research and sometimes (but far from always) my imagination to put together patterns based upon what I have been taught. Not much difference between what I do and the software I sometimes use.

[Lord of the Dance]

Definitely better than a few years ago. I remember reading something similar but it read like a drunk toddler's ad-lib. 

If AI continues to develop at this pace it would seem it won't be too long before it's entirely indistinguishable from something written and edited by human hands. Thank goodness computers don't have use for money on their own.

You forget the word "artificial" in Artificial intelligence. The word is there for a reason and its not what most people think. It does not imply the intelligence is computer-based or in some way not a living person. The word means that the intelligence in question does not possess the skill to create, only to select and combine earlier inputted data. Now it can seem very smart and almost like it has a mind of its own, but right now its still just a program mimicking what it has been taught.

So in other words, the term 'artificial' is referring to the intelligence itself, not alluding to the fact that the computer is obviously an inanimate object. I stick to simple technologies that I understand. 

[andrewfi]

The term is applied to all sorts of things where it isn't relevant or becomes misleading.

When Mark was referring to creativity as a limitation, I gave it a bit of thought.
Here's an example. My Huawei phone has 'artificial intelligence' used in its camera software. It can identify the type of subject being photographed and then use that to optimise exposure. It does more than just this, of course but it makes a good example of limitations on AI.

AI is trained using examples of the item under consideration so that it can identify similar but not identical items (patterns) in the future.
So, my camera can recognise, for example, cats, dogs, babies, elephants and can tell me what it sees.
But if it were to see an object not in its training - for example a zebra, then it cannot tell me it saw a zebra and modify its picture taking to suit the subject. Whereas I, as a human, can say, 'aha, stripey horse' add it to my database and optimise my picture taking for the stripey horse.

The computer system can't make that leap from new data to new pattern and new behaviour - not yet. When that happens we're gonna need John Connor!