Opinion: Should We Embrace AI or Destroy it with Fire?
Our President & Founder Offers His Insight on Using AI in Public Relations & Marketing
A Changing Landscape
Two seismic events in the PR industry occurred last month: Google announced upcoming AI integration into Google Workspace and OpenAI released version 4.0 of ChatGPT.
With AI, Google Workspace will generate images from text for presentations, summarize email threads into a digest, create assignments and summaries in Google Meet, and more. GPT-4 turned a sketch on a paper napkin into a functional website, passed the Bar Exam in the 90th percentile, created a Pong-like game in seconds, and more.
Like it or not, AI is here to stay.
Both Google AI and GPT-4 have the potential to transform our work at Evocati PR and the industry at-large. And in truth, we've been using Jasper.AI for our own PR and marketing needs for nearly six-months with promising results. In fact, Jasper helped me write this op-ed.
How should your PR firm navigate this new world? What impact could it have on you and your clients? To begin, we need to consider the current use cases for AI and one major vulnerability.
Use Cases in Public Relations
AI can be used to identify potential target audiences and create personalized content that resonates with them. By analyzing data from social media, websites, and other sources, AI can help us better understand our clients’ needs and interests.
AI can also be used to automate tasks such as press release writing or media monitoring. This frees up time for our team to focus on more creative tasks such as developing relationships with prospective clients or crafting compelling stories about current clients.
Finally, AI can be used to detect potential crises before they become full-blown problems. By analyzing data in real-time, AI can alert us of any negative sentiment towards a brand or product before it becomes an issue that requires attention.
These are all compelling reasons to use AI in PR and marketing services, but not without one major concern: AI can and does make mistakes. AI algorithms are not perfect and could overlook important information or make decisions based on inaccurate data. This could lead to PR and marketing campaigns that are ineffective or even damaging to a client's reputation.
Why AI Needs a Protocol
Source: Squarespace (2023)
To mitigate potential damage to clients, we believe it's important for PR professionals to have a protocol in place to manage AI being transparent to clients and the public on how it's utilized. This protocol is similar to how some newsrooms have strict editorial controls in place to prevent errors, omissions, and incorrect information from being published. We met as a team about using AI and crafted our own standards for how we'll use it.
Evocati PR’s AI Standards
Here's our way forward as a company, which we hope other professionals consider adopting. These are Evocati PR’s AI Standards:
AI is a powerful tool and a tool only. We will not use AI to replace employees, but to help them perform better. Doing so helps our clients which in turn helps our company.
AI is a starting point. It is not a panacea for the hard work associated with creating PR and marketing content.
AI requires human oversight. Given that AI is error-prone, and what it does produce rarely reflects our clients' brand and voice, we must carefully review and edit its work products.
We've released these standards on our website so that prospective and current clients understand how Evocati PR views and uses AI.
We hope others follow.