World's first newspaper written by an AI seemingly isn't a complete shambles, surprisingly

Various firsts for AI are inevitably going to emerge, and here's a new one: the world's first newspaper written by an AI.

Yes, it's happened, courtesy of an Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, which has produced an AI-generated edition as highlighted by The Guardian.

Certainly as far as we're aware, this is a first of its kind, but this isn't a case of the paper's owners letting AI write the entire thing. Rather, it's a four-page supplement which is written by AI.

The AI edition (supplement) is now available in shops in Italy and online - the first issue was published yesterday, in fact.

Claudio Cerasa, who is editor of Il Foglio, told The Guardian: "It will be the first daily newspaper in the world on newsstands created entirely using artificial intelligence. For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony."

Cerasa explained that humans were only involved in the production of the AI edition in that they asked questions of the AI, and recorded the responses.

According to The Guardian, the articles were reasonably structured, and clearly written, with "no obvious grammatical errors."

Feedback on Reddit (see the post embedded above) appears to run along similar lines, observing that the content is okay, and the style is very much in the vein of the Il Foglio newspaper, as you might hope (if you were a reader, of course). The articles don't read as if they were AI-generated, and it's not a bad effort overall, by all accounts.

Which is either an impressive feat, or perhaps a cause for the more skeptical to wonder exactly how the process of the AI article generation is implemented here.

AI won't be replacing real writers in any hurry, of course. Will it? No, it won't, and that's an end to the argument as far as this (real) writer is concerned - now, excuse me while I bury my head in this pile of sand over here.

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