AI is making headlines again – for the wrong reasons. Hot on the heels of his previous report which revealed the use of fake ‘experts’ in PR, the excellent Rob Waugh has written in Press Gazette about automated PR tech bombarding the UK media with AI guff (sorry, content).
“Olivia Brown” is a £250-a-month AI tool which is apparently regularly being used by some agencies to create ‘press releases’ that target the online national media, whose targets are to churn out constant content full of links.
But PR is not just about links. It’s about a company’s reputation: brand management; product promotion and strategic, ongoing messaging that supports a wider marketing plan and business objectives.
There’s nothing wrong with providing expert advice or getting good online coverage: it’s a tried and tested PR tactic that can position a client well as part of a wider PR programme. My home clients have provided advice in the lifestyle media many times, generating quality coverage in the likes of Ideal Home, The Mirror, HomeStyle and Elle Decoration. My B2B clients working in insurance, construction and food manufacturing have had excellent media coverage in their industry trade titles based on their invaluable advice. This is partly down to their expertise of course, but it’s also down to the fact that I have good relationships with target journalists, know what they are looking for and can turn around an insightful comment quickly.
The more ‘agencies’ use the AI PR tools, the more the reputation of genuine PR is threatened and the more journalists will lose patience as their inbox just gets filled with spam. It becomes a mass of untargeted content that nobody pays attention to. As CIPR CEO Alastair McCapra says: “Coverage delivered without purpose or strategy is not influence, it is noise”.
And this comes at the same time as social media gets more impacted by AI as well. “Social media is no longer social,” says writer Kyle Chayka, commenting on the issue on the BBC’s Worklife page. Where platforms were once filled with real people sharing real moments, they have increasingly been filled with AI generated content. Consumers have moved away from oversharing genuine events and instead are seeing more and more ‘inspirational’ fake content from random sources, making them even less inclined to use the platform, as they simply can’t be bothered to try and outwit the algorithm.
In a constant chase for traffic, proper content has been missed out of the equation. And in an era obsessed with authenticity, things are just looking more and more fake.
This is where quality PR comes in. While AI can lend a hand in other ways in PR – research is a great example – the media outreach and content creation needs to remain human. Clients should only work with genuine professionals: freelancers and agencies who don’t promise clicks, but do provide valuable, longer form content and well thought out campaigns that meet wider business objectives and hit target audiences in memorable and valuable ways.
Maybe it’s time for print to rise again.
