Co-Writing a LinkedIn Article with an AI

Everything in bold was written by jasper.ai - I didn't give it any indications on what I wanted it to write besides the words you read in normal font type.

I gotta say, I wasn't too optimistic when logging in to jasper.ai for the first time, mainly because I wasn't expecting too much, but after trying it out I must say I was pleasantly surprised.

I'd like to briefly explain what jasper does for those who aren't familiar. Jasper is an artificially intelligent platform built by Jasper Technologies Ltd based in Cambridge UK.

Jasper takes RSS feeds as an input and performs sentiment analysis on them to tell whether the article is positive, negative or neutral.

It then allows you to enter your own sentiment, whether it be for that article or generally on a certain topic and then rates the result accordingly.

Everyone loves free stuff, so I thought I'd give jasper a whirl to see what I could come up with. For this task, I started the article I'm currently writing and hit the compose button every ten words or so.

This is what Jasper came up with.

I must say, I'm pretty impressed. Considering I was expecting a load of nonsense, this seems to be fairly well thought out and concise. There are only the rare occasions where it misses small keywords or messes up punctuation but hardly anything to worry about too much.

What I asked myself was, how could I break the engine. How would it react if Angela Merkel met Obama in a dark alley, and I came up to them and introduced myself saying:

"Hey guys! Can I ask you a question?"

I feel like this would confuse the engine as it has no context as to who 'me' is. It'd either answer 'no' out of fear or just spit out some random guess because there isn't anything to hold on to.

If I just write Pokemon Go, will it be able to work out that I mean the mobile app and not a character from Pokemon?

For this task, I started by looking at some articles about pokemon go. In this case, Jasper was actually pretty good. It understood what I meant by 'pokemon' and also used adjectives such as "exciting" and "fun" when talking about the game. Not bad, Jasper.

That's all for now folks, Thanks for reading!

Ok, I guess I'm done – at least according to Jasper. It took a bunch of liberties when finishing my sentences. For example, the first sentence didn't seem to really make sense. I also was taken aback by the self-praise, while ghostwriting this article for me.

In any case, this is both intriguing and terrifying. How many articles can a newspaper launch with such an AI under its belt? How much longer will it take until AIs like Jasper take out all areas of entertainment. Like writing books that never end or creating TV sitcoms that run forever (maybe catered to each individual watcher?)

We will see...