Why PR needs to take care with ChatGPT

How do I introduce another article about ChatGPT and not have you stop reading? Well, a smart Roman once said that Rome would be undone by its own folly and overindulgence. “The enemy is within the gates”, cried Cicero to his inattentive audience. Now, in harking back over 2000 years for my references, I appreciate that I’m reinforcing my luddite credentials when writing about the new bot on the block.

If you are one of those who stretched the holiday to the Australia Day ‘finishing line’ and missed the razzamatazz that greeted the arrival of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, let me explain. In summary, it’s a chatbot which demonstrates artificial intelligence (AI) at the level that’s exciting some of those with serious tech pedigree, including Elon Musk and Bill Gates. The latter has been so enamoured that Microsoft has just made a multibillion dollar investment in the business behind the bot - OpenAI. This is a piece of technology that does some impressive tricks; in geekspeak it’s what’s known as a large language model, so words are its thing – song lyrics, film scripts, essays. It has unnerved education authorities to the extent that Queensland and New South Wales have banned the bot from state schools. They are not alone; New York public schools had already implemented a similar ban.

So, what’s with the Romans and what does ChatGPT’s arrival mean for PR? Well, I mention Cicero as we, as a profession, should firstly, be mindful of how the technology is used and secondly, how those uses are interpreted by others. Despite the whiff of resistance to the writing, I do believe ChatGPT can, in principle, be a useful development for communicators. However, its introduction needs to be managed very carefully by practitioners and their governing bodies alike. Otherwise, that enemy will be firmly ensconced within our gates.

Quite simply, irrespective of the financial attraction of having robots do the work of people, the profession cannot afford to fully embrace the technology as here lies a path of diminishing returns. ChatGPT and other AI applications present an opportunity for the industry, but as a profession we need to be careful that this doesn’t only benefit the opportunists. I fully recognise that there are some aspects of our roles that could be automated such as the monitoring reports, but our adoption of the technology must be measured. The technocrats will talk in terms of technology’s inevitability and so we should steal a march on those other forces threatening the PR space, but ours is a people industry. Lest we forget the P in PR. Rest assured, I’m not returning to my luddite tendencies and bashing bots out of fear, but making a different point, which is that the indiscriminate implementation of ChatGPT and everything that follows will shape they way we are perceived by others, including clients. We can’t throw the baby out with the bot water, as it were. A move that puts technology before people will ensure that we produce tech-oriented outputs, which, unquestionably, will be tactical in nature. As I said, parts of the work we do – such as the monitoring – can be done by machine, but there’s a huge difference between monitoring, and analysing the contextual factors that underpin a client’s coverage, which is when we plainly need the people. It’s the people; our people, who produce the strategic magic. The ability to read the seemingly incongruous, from political debate, consumer behaviours, Hollywood reference points and changing norms to produce compelling strategy. It’s strategy that will ensure the industry’s long-term future, not tactics.

The mid-term economic forecast for agencies and in-house teams will continue to be challenging, but the allure of technology and its apparent promises need to be weighed against the potential cost of losing people and what they can do. Employment expert, Professor David Autor recently said that “AI will help [our] people use expertise better, meaning that we’ll specialize more.” The difficulty with that point is that specialisation takes time to accrue in the first place.

I urge us not to rush into the ChatGPT carnival, otherwise in returning to Cicero, “we may have  our own criminality to contend with”.

This article was first published by Mumbrella (www.mumbrella.com.au)

Is Storytelling in PR worthless?

Naturally, there will be exceptions to the rule, but on the whole, the industry is not equipped to produce compelling stories. I recognise that’s a bold, if not heretical, claim which is in need of some supporting arguments, so here goes.

PR professionals, as with the rest of the communications community, have been slavish to the idea of story, but we haven’t been astute enough to recognise that we tend to do it wrongly. Here’s what I mean, as practitioners we rely on conventional rhetoric to persuade. We mirror our clients, who have been trained this way; as creative writing guru, Robert McKee says, we build our case on facts, stats and quotes from authorities. We see it as an intellectual process, because we can’t see it any other way. Subsequently, we miss the vital component that make stories persuasive – the emotion!

Which begs the question – why do we miss it? As I said, this is partly down to producing what we think the clients want – a safe, logic-driven, data-based approach that typically leaves audiences cold at best. Ultimately though, we can’t do this properly, because as practitioners we’re schooled to keep those emotions in check.  This is especially the case with agency staff – I include myself here as a former agency man – who are immediately alerted of the paramount need to keep clients happy. I’m not saying that agency folk lack maturity per se; of course not, there are some brilliant minds at work here, but I fear they reflect their environmental upbringing which is essentially about one thing – profit. If we don’t fully explore our feelings in this space, including the reality of failure and the uncertainties of a tech future, how can we expect to produce rich, meaningful narratives for others?

Disruption is affecting us all at dizzying speeds, businesses are feeling increasingly vulnerable, so it is incumbent on us as professionals to embrace greater emotional exposure – to demonstrate how we feel - to produce stories and relationships that are reflective of our growing sensitivities and befitting of a more engaged audience.

This article first featured in Mumbrella on the 19 December