Like a lot of people working in professional communications, the emergence of AI, specifically GenAI technologies like ChatGPT, has got me feeling a little, well, triggered!
The ability to take often complex, sophisticated ideas and boil them down into clear impactful messaging, be it written or oral, is our stock and trade.
And so, it’s been more than a little disconcerting of late constantly reading articles about how people without these innate abilities needn’t worry any longer, because AI has now got them covered.
Now they can save all the money they once spent on people like me and companies like mine, effortlessly creating professional content without needing any natural talent or professional experience to do so.
Gulp! Are the communications industries that replaceable? Are we actually about to be made redundant? So fast and so easily?
Surely not.
Having spent many years as a technology journalist, I’ve always been sceptical about digital hype. And the hype around AI is arguably greater than for any other major trend in the short history of the tech industry.
To be fair, this is probably justified. AI is promising – and threatening – to transform our lives in ways we’ve never experienced.
Nevertheless, I’ve interviewed countless CIOs and other digital executives, written acres of text, and hosted podcasts on the subject of AI, typically returning to the key point that AI systems are only as good as the data entered into them, and by extension the data scientists – or other professionals – overseeing them.
So if you follow that logic, AI is clever in proportion to the cleverness of the people designing and deploying it.
And yet, despite this, the constant hype about how AI is going to disrupt everything has definitely got to me.
I still cringe every time a friend or professional associate boasts that they created this or that content by simply ‘asking ChatGPT’, as though they were someone in the late 19th century who’d just discovered the motor car, hurtling past their hapless horse-and-carriage brethren!
So much so that it led me to procrastinate actually playing around with the technology, lest I finally confirm for myself that it’s time for a radical career change.
Recently, however, and despite myself, I decided to employ ChatGPT to help me write a blog that was part of a series for a client exploring various trends in cyber security.
After entering the standard prompts and summary I was shocked and amazed at how quickly it generated what seemed like a very professional, on point and well-written piece of content. It seriously took less than 10 seconds, which is faster than it takes me to read about 700 words. So ChatGPT actually finished writing before I finished reading. Incredible!
And double ‘gulp‘!!!!
However, after the first read, I then read the blog through more slowly, and then a third time.
That’s when the penny dropped.
A powerful sense of déjà vu came over me! “I know what this is!”
Like many people who end up in journalism and PR – or in my case, both – I’ve always been someone who’s found ‘words’ easy. Through school and university, I was always that student who could pull an essay out at the final hour the night before, and still manage at least a credit with little effort.
In ChatGPT I suddenly saw me, the smart-arse, wordy high-school / Uni student cramming at the last minute, and ultimately just ‘phoning it in’.
This blog it created had all the right buzzwords more-or-less in the right order so that it made sense. But there’s no way I could have submitted it to the client as it was.
It was a nicely worded jumble of ideas. But just like with my student self, no amount of carefully-crafted verbosity could disguise the fact that I only had a very general idea of what I was talking about.
And that’s ChatGPT in a nutshell: A clever person just phoning it in.
Which is fine, for instance when you just need to make a start and get a first draft to work with. And for many people, especially those who struggle with writing, just getting started can be the hardest part of the process.
And ChatGPT can certainly give you something very quickly that’s really ‘not that bad’.
But it’s not great. And these days if you want a company to give you good money to do something they can’t handle in-house, I’m sorry to say, but it has to be great!
And arguably the key reason AI can never be ‘great’ at what we professional writers and communicators do is the lack of ‘human connection’.
I recently had a client inform me that the marketing strategy we’d formulated for his real estate company was on hold while he investigated an exciting new ‘AI’ company which not only purported to be using AI to massively scale his lead-gen efforts, but that it could also phone and have conversations with said leads without them even knowing they were talking to a piece of software!
I tried to explain to him that what he was describing – and in fact thought he’d experienced – would unlikely occur in our lifetimes, if it all. But he remains blinded by the hype!
And maybe I’m partly blinded by the hype too. I just wrote, ‘unlikely occur in our lifetimes”??!! Forget that!
The idea that AI can communicate as well, with as much nuance and spontaneity as an actual person, in real time, is infinitely more ridiculous than the idea that ChatGPT can replace professional writers.
We all need to wake up! AI will never be able to emulate humans in this way.
And ChatGPT knows it too.
When I asked whether it thought AI would replace PR, here’s what it said:
‘While AI will undoubtedly transform aspects of PR, such as data analysis and content generation, it’s unlikely to fully replace the field. The human touch, creativity, and strategic relationship-building inherent in PR are essential for navigating complex narratives and fostering genuine connections with audiences.
‘AI can enhance public relations by analyzing data and generating insights, but it lacks the nuanced understanding of human emotions and relationships that are crucial in building and maintaining trust. Effective PR relies on creativity, strategic thinking, and genuine connection—qualities that AI simply cannot replicate.‘
It’s definitely true that AI will ‘transform aspects’ of PR.
And you might argue that it will have a more transformative effect now than it may have had say 40, 30 or even 20 years ago.
That’s because .. TRIGGER WARNING! .. the ‘craft’ of writing is at its lowest ebb that anyone working today has ever witnessed.
People simply don’t read as much as they used to (thank you if you’ve made it this far!), and traditional writing – especially the pen and paper kind – is virtually extinct as a practice.
Today audio books are one of the fastest growing areas of publishing.
But hardly anyone, apart from maybe sight-impaired people had ‘audio’ books in the 90s, let alone the 80s. If you wanted to know what a book was about and be able to give an intelligent account of it, you had to actually thumb the pages and read the words printed on them!
Which is not to dismiss audio books. They’re really great for helping to ensure more people know, for instance, the import of the great ‘classic’ novels; the ‘big stories’ that undergird our culture and society.
But their growing popularity today is certainly contributing to weaker reading, and therefore ‘writing’ muscles.
Both are important in developing the ability to write well, let alone be a ‘great’ writer.
And many younger people working in communications today simply suck at both.
Also, the discipline of writing seems to have fallen down the list of priorities for educators. Back in the 80s it would have been unthinkable that a good student going on and graduating from university wouldn’t be able to properly use apostrophes. Or that even an average HSC student would be confused about the difference between there, their and they’re, or you’re and your.
Now you even find people working in communications professions with only a fairly loose understanding of these important rules. What’s worse, and even perverse, is the increased sense of pride many take in this sort of ignorance.
I recently noticed a fairly high-profile, and senior person in the t-technology journalism field contend on LinkedIn that not only colons and semi-colons were superfluous for professional writers, but so too were commas! With disinformation like this, AI’s chances of putting certain creative professionals out of work surely increases. But only slightly.
Years ago, a friend of mine decided that he no longer needed to fret about not having a driver’s license because driverless cars would soon be everywhere. No need to learn the multitude of road rules and understand their nuanced application in real-time situations. Just let a computer do it for you.
Well, just as that hasn’t come to pass 10 years on, people who can’t write, or even just not write that well, won’t be able to do so with the use of AI alone.
Not now. Not ever.
David Binning is the founder and CEO of Sydney-based PR, marketing and events agency, Brand Comms Bureau