ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE How is ChatGPT going to impact the PR and communications industry?

AI and machine learning offer pros and cons, but there is scepticism across about its potential to replace human content writing roles.

The sudden rise of ChatGPT has taken a range of industry sectors by storm, not least the global PR and communications business, which generates a wide range of content for its clients.?

These can range from fairly simple product-focused SEO posts, through to corporate blogs, high-level thought-leadership articles, research studies and white papers.

So, how concerned should public relations and communications practitioners be? Chris Mueller, Content Group Manager and leader of a team of 15 content writers for PR agency Matter, notes in a recent blog post that that are both pros and cons, although there is still scepticism across the PR and marketing landscape about its potential to replace human content writing roles.

“While it can generate clean prose in an authoritative tone mirroring a human’s writing, there’s no guarantee the content will be truthful, accurate or unbiased. A few media publications who were early adopters of generative AI-powered content?were already forced to issue retractions?due to ‘dangerous inaccuracies and falsehoods’ found within the articles,” he says.

“More importantly, ChatGPT is incapable of replicating the intrinsic nature of a human content writer, which means it doesn’t incorporate any elements of human experience (HX) into the content-creation process.”

PR teams must be working to create differentiation

Much of what PR companies and marketing teams need to do is “to zig while competitors zag” and uniquely position themselves or their clients as an invaluable source of truth.

Similarly, for executive thought leadership to rise above the noise in a saturated market, it must be crafted with an empathetic understanding for not only the client’s mission and goals, but also the real-world business challenges faced by their target audience.??

These, he believes, are not easily achievable through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Only boots on the ground can deliver impactful, brand mission-oriented content that aligns with those experiences. Not an AI chatbot relying on large language models from billions of predefined telemetry datasets,” Mueller says.

However, ChatGPT and its AI competitors can potentially assist in the time-consuming research processes that are often required for certain types of content.

“ChatGPT, in theory, could be prompted to conduct extensive research on a specific technology or subject matter – reducing the elongated preliminary sourcing process down to about 30 seconds,” he observes. “In turn, human writers have more time to focus on critical thinking and a higher baseline of knowledge and resources to leverage.”

Read the full blog post?here.

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