Alibaba’s AI Can Write E-Commerce Product Descriptions In Seconds

Jul. 3, 2018

For merchants selling on e-commerce portals, copywriting skills are as important as their ability to make goods that people want to buy. Of course, the skill doesn’t come naturally to many merchants who have been busy building a business and hiring a copywriter is not always smooth. Which is why Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced a copywriting tool which canchurn out 20,000 lines of original content per second.

Alibaba’s marketing arm, Alimama, announced that the copywriting AI has passedTuring testwhich is used to judge a machine’s ability to mimic human responses.Alibabasays that the AI has learned the trade of writing original copies by digging into the “millions of top-quality existing samples” on itse-commerce websitesTmall and Taobao as well as Mei.com and 1688.com using “natural language processing“. It claims that fashion brands like Dickies and Esprit are already using this tool to auto-generate copies.Copies produced by Alibaba’s AI

To begin with the automatic copy generation, all a merchant needs to do is provide the link to the product’s current page, click on the “Produce Smart Copy”, and Alibaba’sAI will produce a variety of versionswhich can be used by these sellers. Thetone of the copy can be adjustedto make it sound “promotional, functional, fun, poetic or heartwarming“, says the officialblog post.

One of the compelling attributes of the tool, Alimama says, is that it willimprove the efficiency of copywriters, giving them the ability to “shift from thinking up copy—one line at a time—to choosing the best out of many machine-generated options“. This is because a product might need multiple copies for different media based on where the content needs to be posted.

Creativity is one of the areas wheremachines will continue to learn from humans, suggests Alimama’s GM, Christina Lu. Hence, using the AI, human writers can rid themselves of the repetitive work and spend time being more creative. Likewise, people in the marketing departments can think of more unique ways of selling their products without necessarily being professional writers, themselves.

Human creativity is the cornerstone for the machine, which isn’t able to replace the creativity of people – Christina Lu

Besides the new AI Copywriter,Alibaba already has a suite of AI-backed tools, including its “smart banner designer”, designed to provide support to small and medium-sized enterprises. Currently, these tools are limited to Chinese, but we can expect similar tools for other languages in the near future.

Meanwhile, you can also hireAI Writerto work on articles for you while all you need to do is provide a title for your story. Welcome to the future of writing!