Artificial Intelligence at smartocto

Welcome to this page about artificial intelligence. Here you’ll find updates on all the AI-driven products smartocto offers.

Media futurists see Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as the meteor that’s immediately changed the lives of publishing dinosaurs - even if they don’t know it yet. The real question is, of course, what the actual value of AI will look like.

Smartocto.ai gives 5 simple yet effective ways of introducing AI to your newsroom:

1. advanced headline testing
2. automatic content classification (including user needs)
3. smart story rewriting
4. timing optimisation
5. an intelligent virtual assistant

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Please follow our content about this topic:

• CEO Erik van Heeswijk reveals AI-driven improvements at smartocto in a webinar.
• We give an overview of the current state of the media sector regarding artificial intelligence.
• How to start using AI in your newsroom
• Free AI tool assists in recognising user needs
• Here's how AI is changing content analytics
• Let us introduce to you: your next virtual assistant
• AI in journalism & the lessons of the early internet

Do you want to have a quick demo of smartocto.ai? Check the short webinar (15 minutes) below.

Some background about AI and content analytics

The last decade has seen data become the publisher's new fuel, and investment in analytics has risen enormously. Every content team has had an abundance of historical and real time numbers at their disposal. But at the same time, an uneasiness has started to emerge at the editor level: who has the time or skill to interpret all these numbers? Data has started to feel like a burden.

Partly this is because the insights generated from data have not made clear what the right course of action is. And, that being the case, the vast potential of data for the world of digital publishing has simply fallen short. To scratch this itch, the term ‘actionability’ was coined - and the emphasis switched to having analytics insights that could actually be acted upon. While this did yield more practical use cases, , in real terms actionability was still a conceptual fix: the analytics at its core did not change.

Real actionability requires a paradigm shift, and that is exactly where AI will play a crucial part.

AI and real actionability

In the truest sense of the word, actionability requires that analytics are paired with clear advice or tips about what to do next. Editors should know what optimisation or which story has the highest priority, and what the benefits will be if precious time is devoted to it. The data itself should talk. Analytics, powered by AI, can do that. They’ll become a personalised data analyst in a box, a car navigation system that shows you where to go left and right.

So there you have it. The big revolution of foundational models like Claude or ChatGPT is that AI is smoothly applied to human day-to-day language. That opens big new possibilities for storytellers, especially journalists and content marketeers.

In previous years, analytics revolved mainly around human behaviour, measured in clicks, likes, and views. Now with generative AI, reporting systems know a lot more about what the content is actually about. Style, sentiment, readability, topic and format, a real match between audience and story qualities can be understood on a deeper level. This will no doubt lead to more specific personalisation, or help inform more advanced content strategies.

Smartocto.ai and decision making

Smartocto launched smartocto.ai, the first editorial analytics system where AI leads to decision-making. That advanced proprietary combination of Machine Learning, knowledge bases and foundation models will solve problems like what is the best headline, which paragraph or story needs to be rewritten and how, and deep content classification.

Smartocto.ai is even creating a virtual assistant that delivers strategic and practical advice to all the roles in the newsroom. With this, every media professional will have their own personal AI sitting right next to them. We are already seeing very promising results.

This AI is trained by smartocto, and will be completely focused on story strategies. At the same time, values like story copyright and confidentiality are completely secured.

In short: data will really talk to you and only you. It could be the final step in analytics.

Smartocto 8 rule Ethics framework for AI

Smartocto, being at the forefront in AI for journalism, a supplier of machine learning and LLM technology as well as a thought leader in the media space, needs to be aware of the responsibilities that go with that. Generative AI is a very new technology and has the potential to radically change media and journalism. Therefore smartocto will act according to a clear ethical framework, consisting of 8 clear points:

1. smartocto sees and uses AI as a force for good and actively supports measures that minimize the negative effects of AI on individuals and society
2. smartocto will strive to work with AI vendors and partners that have a clear ethics framework around AI use in place
3. smartocto will actively propagate for clients - media and marketing organisations - to work according to clear AI ethics rules, and to make them explicit to their employees and audiences
4. smartocto will advocate - especially with respect to journalistic newsrooms - oversight, meaning that AI projects are monitored and AI output always needs to be manually checked by an editor before published
5. smartocto prefers the data set and output that is the least discriminatory based on language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status
6. smartocto in developing AI features, will respect copyright and privacy
7. smartocto will strive for the least harmful AI output for individuals and society, and is the most accurate
8. smartocto will strive for and actively support research, training and awareness on the possibilities - positive and negative - of AI