Alibaba’s AI tool can produce 20,000 ads in one second

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its way to the e-commerce section too, as one of the major e-commerce companies have created a copywriting tool that can write up to 20,000 lines of advertising content per second.

Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba has introduced an AI program, called ‘AI Copywriter’, that has the ability to write 20,000 lines of advertising copy in a second. The good news, however, is that it won’t replace or pose a threat to humans.

AI Copywriter works by using deep learning and natural language processing technologies to learn from the millions of lines of already existing copies on Alibaba’s various Chinese e-commerce platforms including Tmall, Taobao, 1688.com, and Mei.com, explained South China Morning Post.

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Businesses that advertise on these platforms can insert a link on one of their product pages and click ‘produce smart copy’ button to view various advertising ideas generated by a machine instead of humans.

The AI tool even passed the Turning test – test of a computer’s ability to behave like a human – but Alibaba claims that the tool won’t replace humans, as per CNBC. “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,” said Christina Lu, general manager of Alibaba’s marketing arm Alimama that launched the tool.

The generated copy has been called as ‘promotional, functional, fun, poetic or heartwarming’. “Human creativity is the cornerstone for the machine, which isn’t able to replace the creativity of people,” Lu added.

Furthermore, Alibaba states that the tool is already being used a million times per day by small to mid-size firms, including fashion firm Espirit, that create multiple versions of ads to rephrase their existing copies.

“For merchants, from today onwards, AI can take care of a portion of their copywriting needs. And it significantly changes the way (copywriters) work: They will shift from thinking up copy — one line at a time — to choosing the best out of many machine-generated options, largely improving efficiency,” Alimama said.

Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma had earlier said that humans should work with machines and consider them as ‘partners’ instead of opponents.