According to Alimama, “copywriting involves a certain degree of repetitive, low-value work that can be made more efficient.” The company said the technology could “take care of a portion of their copywriting needs”. According to the company, the AI-copywriter tool, which uses deep learning and natural language processing technologies to produce copies, has successfully passed the Turing Test during which a computer could imitate a human sufficiently well so that another human could not distinguish the difference. For instance, fashion chain Esprit and Texas clothing brand Dickies are already using the Chinese-language tool. Shaozhang Ding, e-Commerce Head for the Asia Pacific market at Esprit, said, “The AI copywriter is a really amazing tool. Based on a massive database of existing copy and advanced AI technologies, the tool can reduce the repetitive and tedious copywriting workload for our teams.” To access the tool, Alibaba said brands and advertisers can insert a link to any product page and click the ‘Produce Smart Copy’ button to see multiple copy ideas” from which to select from. The machine learning AI offers the options to tweak the length and tone of the copies depending upon the intent of the advertisers. It can produce copies having the tone as “promotional, functional, fun, poetic or heartwarming.” However, there is no clarity when other language versions of the product will be available. “The tool is used on average nearly a million times per day, by merchants and marketers on Alibaba-owned sites such as Taobao, Tmall, Mei.com (a fashion flash sale website) and 1688.com (Alibaba’s Chinese-language wholesale buying site),” the company said. “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. “As with design, copywriting involves a certain degree of repetitive, low-value work that can be made more efficient. A single product might require up to 10 versions of copy for different ad formats, like posters, web banners, product pages and other special event pages.” While trying to explain the role for humans once the AI was employed, Alimama general manager of marketing Christina Lu said: “Human creativity is the cornerstone for the machine, which isn’t able to replace the creativity of people. AI for marketing allows people to devote more energy to richly creative work.” This is not the first time that such the Chinese e-commerce giant has launched an AI-powered tool to help small to mid-sized businesses on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. In April this year, Alibaba had released a smart banner designer tool that could resize and reformat website ad banners automatically or with the slide of a mouse. Additionally, the company had also created an AI-powered video editing tool to help merchants excerpt key text and images from a product page to generate 20-second promotional videos that they can include on their listings. Source: Mumbrella Asia
