PR agencies uncomfortable with the fusion of artificial intelligence and public relations — including the addition of AI-generated writing tools — need to realize that they need to incorporate these new solutions into their businesses – or start looking for another line of work.
“Those who embrace AI will have a leg-up in connecting brands with new audiences and on a deeper level, providing more value to organizations,” observes Rebecca Wilson, EVP, WE Communications, Singapore and Australia.
“If agencies fail to accept this new reality and fear AI as a competitor rather than a counterpart, brands will move forward themselves — without agency partners — given the imperative for change.”
Wilson is one of a number of PR pros quoted in this article who believe artificial intelligence and public relations will be inseparable in coming years.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Communications: Sector Most Likely to Be Disrupted by AI: A new survey examining artificial intelligence and public relations –released by Fleishman Hillard finds — that 81% of the respondents believe communications is the industry most likely to be disrupted by AI during the next five years.
Essentially, the study — which relies on insights from 25 AI experts — found that AI disruption is real, potent and happening right now. “This isn’t a conversation for 2025,” observes Charlie Oliver, CEO, Tech2025 and Mission AI. “The time is now to have this public discourse.”
*AI-Generated Writing: More Customizable Than Commonly Known: While AI-generated writing has acquired a reputation for rendering text as plain vanilla prose – think simple sports stories or dry financial reports – advanced AI writing tools offer more flexibility.
AI writing toolmakers like Arria, for example, offer companies the ability to stylize prose – which can bring added authenticity and engagement to the writing.
Essentially, the text customization of such tools are only limited by the creativity of the person or persons customizing them for a company – which in the case of business reports, is often the company’s data analytics team.
“The same analysts who have been writing those repetitive reports at regular intervals know how to talk about your industry in terms that ring true within the field,” Arria notes in its blog.
“When their expertise is added to the natural language generation system system, they will effectively author hundreds or thousands more reports than they can now produce without natural language generation technology.”
Learn more in Arria’s rundown on five key ways AI-generated writing can bring new life to business reports generated by programs like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, MicroStrategy and Qlik.
Bring Company Insights Alive With Data-Generated Stories: While data visualizations offered by business intelligence programs have gone a long way towards illuminating actionable insights for companies, AI-generated writing making sense of that same data can make those insights even more compelling – and profitable.
Narrative Science, an AI-generated toolmaker, takes a look at how its solution easily renders company data into “plain-English stories,” according to Anna Schena, manager, product marketing, Narrative Science.
*Unintended Consequence of AI-Generated Writing: A Tsunami of Spam Content?: AI aficionados fear that AI writing tools could be used to generate endless reams of shallow content across the Web, in a cynical attempt to boost search engine returns.
“AI could churn out infinite blogs, Web sites, and marketing spam. The content would be cheap to produce and stuffed full of relevant keywords,” observes The Verge writer James Vincent. “It would be the information equivalent of empty calories, but still potentially difficult for a search engine to distinguish from the real thing.”
*Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Investigative Journalism: Jonathan Stray, a research scholar in journalism at Columbia University, offers an in-depth look at AI coupled with investigative journalism, done right.
“Many have envisioned the use of AI methods to find hidden patterns of public interest in large volumes of data, greatly reducing the cost of investigative journalism,” Stray observes.
“But so far, only a few investigative stories have utilized AI methods, in relatively narrow ways. This paper surveys what has been accomplished in investigative reporting using AI techniques, why it has been difficult to apply more advanced methods, and what sorts of investigative journalism problems might be solved by AI in the near term,” he adds.
*Taking No Prisoners: AI’s Impact on Writers and Publishers: New York Times Bestselling Author Joanna Penn predicts a widespread takeover of nonfiction writing by AI, triggering an unending torrent of new, Internet-distributed content in coming years.
“The new tools that are emerging are both exhilarating but also terrifying for those who don’t embrace the change,” she observes. In this one-hour podcast (also available as an article), Penn details nine ways she believes AI will disrupt authors and publishers.
*AI-Driven Investigative Journalism: A Primer: Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University — and a builder of AI tools for investigative journalists — offers a look into her work in this 20-minute video.
*How AI Is Changing the Jobs of Technical Writers: Rehan Ijaz, editor at BigDataShowcase, takes a look at how AI-generated writing and supplementary AI writing support tools are changing the jobs of technical writers.
“Machine learning is having a profound impact on the field,” Ijaz observes. “You can use machine learning technology in a number of ways to make your technical writing more effective.”
*Deceit Gets Smarter – Can Truth Keep Up? An in-depth look from Stanford Magazine at how artificial intelligence is being used to manipulate the news.
–Joe Dysart is a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.