IFTTT adds AI automation to its long list of useful features

IFTTT, the user-friendly automation platform, is the latest to catch AI fever. The platform has announced three new AI services for its paying subscribers that will generate content for social media posts or blogs and summarise content from other posts or blogs.

The new AI services, aptly named AI Social Creator, AI Content Creator, and AI Summarizer, can integrate with a user’s automation so even less human effort and creativity are needed. The only thing you do need is a R100/m IFTTT Pro+ subscription.

IFTTT automates automation with AI

In case you’re new, IFTTT is an initialism from the phrase ‘if this, then that’. This conditional statement, also called an ‘If-then statement’, is frequently used in mathematics and computer science for… you know, clever things.

In this case, the automation platform of the same name uses the same logic as its basis. It allows users to create ‘applets’ using ‘triggers’ and ‘actions’ to link a wide range of devices and services and have them all work together. Stuff uses IFTTT to automatically post its latest articles to its Facebook page and Telegram news channel, for example.

IFTTT’s AI Social Creator and AI Content Creator, unsurprisingly, create short-form and long-form content for social media or blog posts respectively while AI Summarizer, also unsurprisingly, summarises articles from your favourite news outlets and deliver them to your inbox.

Don’t feel like tweeting about your latest blog post? Have AI Social Creator automatically generate a tweet complete with description and link, pulled from your blog’s RSS feed. Too lazy to think of new blog post ideas? AI Content Creator can use prompts you provide to generate an outline for you and save it to your Google Drive.

These new services are powered by OpenAI’s slightly-old-by-now GPT-3.5 AI language model, despite the new GPT-4 model being announced. This could mean the services have the same potential for providing inaccurate information or downright lies as seen from ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing. We’d recommend caution and thorough testing before using these new features in any official capacity.