Why I still love writing - and how ChatGPT has given me a wake-up call

I love writing. It’s one of the perks of my job that writing still forms a significant part of what I do – messaging, Q&A, bylines, press releases, exec speeches, employee memos, and much more. I STILL LOVE DOING IT! Given all the chat about ChatGPT I’ve been thinking a lot this week as we prepare for our quarterly earnings announcements about what role writing will play in our jobs in the future, and I think it’s given me a bit of a wake-up call.

I distinctly remember the first PR writing challenge I was given as part of the recruitment process for my graduate job in a PR agency. We each had to write a press release about scissors, as though scissors had just been invented and we were launching them to the world. We needed to tell a story about this invention, explain how they looked, how the blades glided over each other to slice through something, and, most importantly, why they mattered and were better than the existing methods of cutting things. Writing it was fun, and it challenged my brain to think about something commonplace for all of us as though it had never been seen or used before.

While I rarely write press releases about new products these days, I still write a lot or use the principles of writing to do my job. And what I mean by principles is this. Whether we are writing a speech, announcing a new product, or sharing bad news with employees, we must tell a story. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have goodies/baddies and knights in shining armour. We’ve been telling stories for centuries, and there is a reason why they are so good; they have a structure we can understand, and they make us feel something.

But even when we’re not writing we still use the model of storytelling to help shape our thinking. How many of us start putting pen to paper/fingers to keyboard and type something only to delete parts of it, move things around, or start all over? The process of writing helps shape our thinking, and often it’s only when you put pen to paper that you realise what you thought was a good story just isn’t. The process of writing helps us hone and shape something, identify the gaps, and ultimately make it more powerful. For me, the process is as important as the outcome.

So where does ChatGPT fit into our armoury moving forward? Like many of us in this industry, I’ve had a play around with it and it’s frightening and exciting in equal measure in terms of what it can do. I even sat with our CFO this week in Palo Alto while we used it to write a pretend earnings announcement. It was bloody good! It used the correct language, knew the ‘formula’ of what needed to be included in an earnings announcement, and was fast. But it missed a beat on some key things - tone of voice and up-to-date industry insight to connect the dots on our numbers and what’s happening in the world.

It did make me realise that our writing can very quickly become lazy, and maybe we write the way we always have because it’s easy and we’re on a deadline. Sometimes good-enough is good enough. If AI can write a financial earnings announcement as well as I can, that says more about me than it. We must consider it a challenge to think about how even the driest content needs to be reinvigorated. The reality is that it gave me a wake-up call – words matter, and they are one of the greatest gifts and talents we have in this profession and just like all skills, we need to spend time improving and honing them. I was honoured recently to write a funeral speech for a former Lenovo executive – someone I had known and worked with for 10 years, seen operate in the business, and knew what others thought and felt about him. I’m not sure ChatGPT could have written that speech; even if it could, I wouldn’t have wanted it to.

That said, I will certainly use ChatGPT moving forward; it can be a shortcut to help us with a few things and will be a good benchmark for improving our content. I still love the feeling of writing; it is cathartic, intellectually rewarding, and a bit like therapy. I love tinkering over a sentence and landing on the perfect word or phrase – it's so satisfying. But most of all, I find it a good distraction from the ‘to do’ list and the ever-looming inbox. More than anything, it’s my way of procrastinating. This is why I am writing this article two hours before we file our third-quarter financial results when I should be writing a media briefing book for our CFO for an interview tomorrow morning. Maybe I should get ChatGPT to write the briefing book instead.

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Additional reading:

https://www.prmoment.com/could-ai-take-over-the-work-of-many-prs

https://www.prmoment.com/pros-and-cons-of-chatgpt-for-prs