Artificial Intelligence for PR: tips for you not to live without it anymore

I heard through the grapevine that some PR agencies are already using artificial intelligence for media pitches. This is what Gini Dietrich said in Spin Sucks, our favorite PR blog.

Dietrich reports that New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill recently received a media pitch e-mail complimenting her for writing a book that doesn't even exist. When responding to the PR executive’s email, the journalist asked where he had gotten the information from and he confessed to having used ChatGPT without checking another source.

Lesson to be learned: using your head hasn't gone out of style yet.

Does this mean that ChatGPT does not have the intelligence it promises to have? The answer is, to say the least, curious. Artificial Intelligence has hallucinations, this is the term used in the language of Machine Learning, when AI gives wrong information. AI is trained to answer prompts. When it doesn't know the answer, it can make it up. 

How is a PR Executive to do?

Artificial Intelligence is not the flavor of the month. It has come to stay. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT in just two months already had 100 million users. Bard, from Google, was launched inBrazil on July 13, 2023, promising to to offer a complete suite of products. 

Never before has the adoption of digital services happened so  quickly.

For PR professionals, who spend hours researching and editing text, it is essential to learn how to use the accelerating power of artificial intelligence to speed up the creation process and to increase productivity. Thus, freeing space to focus on what matters: the human strategy behind communications activities.

Examples of artificial intelligence applied to PR:

Taylor - No, not millennial darling Taylor Swift. It's the PRophet's AI tool that helps PR professionals write pitches and press releases. Taylor has a transparent algorithm that details the logic behind the creation of texts, so PR professionals can revise the content accordingly.

PressHook - PressHook generates lists of press outlets and journalists. Artificial Intelligence is a mixture of ChatGPT or Bard with well-known journalist registration tools, such as Comunique-se, and promises to save PR professionals from 3 to 5 hours of work per week.

Amiga - With a very suggestive name, this AI is not meant to be your newest confidant who listens to you talking about your relationship dramas. Amiga is an acronym for Artificial Media Intelligence Generator and Assistant and promises to be a mixture of the two tools we mentioned earlier. With a database of more than 5 million real press releases and data from more than a million journalists and hundreds of millions of stories, it uses this model to generate personalized pitches for each journalist, based on their previous work. It can be a good starting point for PRs to add that personal and strategic touch to the material before spreading it around the world.

Owly - Leaving the press office reality to join the world of social networks, Owly is the newest AI from the darling Hootsuite, known for those who work with social media. The tool generates posts and subtitles based on prompts, content from a web page (the company's blog, for example) and even evaluates what's popular to rewrite posts with less engagement. 

Do's and Don'ts of Artificial Intelligence Applied to PR

To help us understand what we should and shouldn't do, the PR Council, released a code of ethics and principles for the use of AI in PR. It is worth checking it out.

Here at SmartPR, we've created our own code, inspired by the PR Council and studies on the impact of AI in research. So let's go.

What to do

1. Use to find keywords on a particular subject.
2. Use it to edit or translate already verified texts, the robot is a beast at this.
3. It’s a great way  to find search databases.
4. Check alternative sources to the results that AI brings.
5. Review texts produced or translated by AI. It will save time, but it can bring errors.

What not to do

1. NEVER publish ANYTHING produced by AI without reviewing, analyzing and including your strategic look and experience.
2. Do not put any kind of customer material on AI platforms or tools. Any search attempt becomes public information.
3. Don't use the suggestions as final copy for campaigns. There is a risk that you may be infringing copyright laws.
4. Do not use it to create fake news.
5. Do not use it to search lists of sources on a particular subject. The robot does not have the ability to make this type of connection.
6. Do not use it to predict trends. ChatGPT, for example, was launched at the end of 2022, but the information is only updated until 2021. Bard, on the other hand, is more up-to-date. Still, it's worth taking a good look before considering what comes from AI.

While Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful tool, it’s important to remember that it is no substitute for human expertise and intuition. You know that special thing you feel when you see a very creative campaign or a text that stirs your emotions? It's all our experience, laughter and tears that allows this to happen. The same thing applies to well-done project creation, the type that you want to show even to your parents, because it reached exactly the point that  customers needed or that humanized service, which understands the struggles that the Marketing or Communication interface goes through.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. Can't handle it? Join it. But make no mistake. Those who know how to use it as one more tool – a hi-tech tool and much more powerful than the previous ones, it's true, but still a tool – to leverage what PR professionals have the best: their creativity and strategy.

If you need help, count on SmartPR.