Across the business world, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are met with equal parts anticipation and apprehension. Public relations is no exception—with media relations as one of the critical inflection points for industry adoption of this emerging technology. While AI in its current form doesn’t have the capacity to replace skilled workers, it can help humans complete some tasks more efficiently. But does this mean businesses should be using AI for media relations? It’s critical for decision makers to remember that AI platforms and applications are tools meant to be used at the discretion of professionals. While AI has the potential to present both opportunities and challenges, how it’s used to supplement the skills of experienced professionals will make all the difference in the impact it can have on your business.
Potential Uses for AI in Media Relations
In the deadline-driven world of public-facing communications, AI has the potential to offer welcome relief for time-strapped professionals by creating processes that generate faster task completion. While you wouldn’t recommend using AI with abandon, it presents exciting opportunities for professionals to be more efficient with their time.
Improved Content Creation
Communications requires personality, creativity and knowledge of the subject matter at hand. While AI tools can’t fulfill all of these requirements, they can be used to assist with content creation. Generative AI can inspire creativity by producing a list of prompts within seconds, allowing you to ideate off of the best ideas to settle on a story you can develop into the dazzling content your client expects. Other tools can be used to gather scattered ideas into outlines or lists that can be used for active research.
Measuring Audience Research
Businesses have long used predictive analytics and data analysis to define their target audiences. Analyzing data at the speed of technology is impossible for humans, making scanning massive volumes of data and converting the findings into readable reports the perfect use case for AI’s positive impact. You can then use relevant keyword searches to segment audiences further and increase personalization. This data-driven approach will not only save time, it can also improve your targeting practices.
Faster Technical Research
It’s not unusual for companies with highly technical products to hire marketing professionals without substantial tech knowledge. After all, they’re seeking communication services, not professionals to build their products. Research is a vital part of producing accurate marketing materials, but it’s also time-consuming.
AI can digest information quickly and condense it into easy-to-use explanations to shrink the time demands of research. Media professionals can ask a series of simple questions to learn more about complex topics like software development, financial services or cybersecurity. Using the results as a starting point for fact-checking can allow you to become fluent in a highly-technical subject in a fraction of the time.
Automation of Routine Tasks
Saving time to increase production is one of the main arguments in favor of present-day AI adoption. Since AI learns from human behavior, it’s ideal for performing repetitive tasks. AI tools can gather, analyze and categorize all types of data for tasks ranging from reporting to list-building.
Challenges Created by AI
AI is called artificial intelligence for a reason. It isn’t perfect by any means and it cannot generate content with the same accuracy, creativity and humanity produced by human intelligence. As such, the use of AI will create challenges for media professionals that we haven’t dealt with in the past.
Fake News
We’ve all heard of fake news, but have you heard of AI hallucinations? The data produced by AI isn’t 100% accurate—and sometimes it’s entirely fictitious. AI hallucinations occur when a generative AI tool connects nonexistent patterns of information to create nonsensical or inaccurate outputs. AI toolChatGPT itself recognizes this limitation, noting that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”
AI cannot dependably be used as a source on its own. For the foreseeable future, it will have to be combined with human judgment, thorough sourcing, and stringent fact-checking
Awkward Phrasing
While modern AI is capable of human-like speech, the software doesn’t always excel in this area. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that AI can’t currently phrase much of anything better than a communications professional. AI tools can generate prompts, outlines and even full articles. However, AI-generated content often contains repetitions of the same phrase, overuse of certain sentence structures and inappropriate social and emotional phrasing. In some cases, AI content may be presented out of context and fail to make sense in the situation for which you intend to use it.
However, the fact that AI can’t replace you doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t use it. TAI can help writers save time and meet tight deadlines, as long as they take the time to fact-check and thoroughly review content for patterns and inconsistencies that wouldn’t exist in human-generated content.
Ethical Considerations
Ethics has always been a strong consideration of media relations professionals, and AI interjects new concerns. Journalists and marketing professionals are tasked with navigating the murky waters of how much AI should be used in development and whether they should disclose the use of AI. Artificial intelligence also has the potential to introduce bias, raise questions about data transparency, spread misinformation and create privacy issues.
The Associated Press has published guidelines for AI use. Among other requirements, the guidelines state that “output from a generative AI tool should be treated as unvetted source material,” and “we do not allow the use of generative to add or subtract any elements” of photos, video or audio. It wouldn’t be surprising to see other media industry professionals publishing their framework for the safe and professional use of AI in the near future.
Like other technological advancements, AI is here to stay. Professionals who use it responsibly are likely to reap many time-saving benefits—but it remains critical to use human judgment and skills to maintain the precision and accuracy the media relations sector demands.
