Mumbai: The breakneck speed of technological progress often transcends all boundaries of human expectations; just as it has done over the past few months, thanks to the advancements in ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that is already taking the entire world by storm! Indeed, by revolutionising the way we humans interact with technology, OpenAI’s language model ChatGPT is today emerging as a ‘game-changer’ across various industries, including the Indian public relations (PR) industry.
If you are a PR industry insider, chances are high that you’ve already seen and heard a lot of buzz in the media about ChatGPT. Or you might have even tinkered around with this tool quite a few times. But have you explored ChatGPT’s use in your own PR profession to the fullest? Maybe not.
In this article, my attempt is to empower you with the right knowledge for unlocking AI’s transformative potential within the PR and communications arena.
Harnessing ChatGPT for PR Industry’s Betterment
In a highly fast-paced and dynamic industry such as PR, a technology marvel like ChatGPT can prove to be a valuable asset when used intelligently and responsibly. From streamlining workflows to improving the productivity of PR professionals like never before, from generating research material, data insights, and ideas in a matter of seconds to automating mundane tasks, and much more, ChatGPT is capable of facilitating a lot of ‘high-value’ work.
Effective use of ChatGPT enables modern-day PR pros to free up more of their own professional time, which they can now spend on strategic endeavors such as media relationship-building. On the other hand, for agencies and organizations specializing in PR and strategic communications, the positive implications of ChatGPT use include a reduction in turnaround times by achieving faster and better outputs for their clients while leveraging existing resources, optimizing the quality and quantity of their services, and bringing forth an overall agile work culture.
To cite some of the practical scenarios wherein ChatGPT can assist publicists, let’s try to visualize a PR practitioner who is looking to quickly generate some relevant and ‘newsworthy’ topic ideas to impress a client or a journalist. ChatGPT may have already become their go-to tool, or is bound to soon become so! Additionally, ChatGPT can also be asked to summarize the key points from an online article or to find websites for SEO link-building. This tool can also help you create well-structured first drafts for PR content pieces, be it a press release, pitch note, or authored article or blog. Today, ChatGPT is being employed by creative industry professionals to create campaign outlines, content for pitch decks, competitor analysis, market sentiment monitoring, and crisis management, among other strategic tasks; and of course, the Indian PR industry can follow suit. As a matter of fact, the possibilities of technologies like ChatGPT in terms of fortifying the PR industry are endless – even though its use cases will differ based on varying contexts.
While all that may sound exciting, it is of utmost importance to be aware that, just as with any other emerging technology, ChatGPT too, comes with its own caveats and limitations. And that without exercising human oversight, it is nearly impossible for a PR industry professional to get the best out of ChatGPT utilization – for any use case whatsoever!
Realizing ChatGPT’s Shortcomings in Serving PR Needs
So, where does ChatGPT fall short in terms of delivering effective PR outcomes when compared to its human counterparts? One key aspect relating to PR and reputation-building where this tool underperforms is by compromising on standards of creativity and originality. By often scraping information from the Internet, its responses not only miss out on the unique human touch and emotional intelligence that are ‘oh-so-essential’ for effective PR but also pose wide-ranging reputational threats for today’s organizations and workers, especially as it sometimes produces plagiarized and previously-copyrighted content. Furthermore, with a knowledge cut-off till 2021, ChatGPT struggles to provide up-to-date and latest trending information – the much-needed ‘knowledge capital’ of our industry.
Furthermore, ChatGPT does not do a great job at showcasing a contextual understanding of matters, nor in understanding or producing nuanced and subtle communication. Instead, many a time, the tool comes up with misleading or way too generic (robotic-sounding) ses that barely would reflect a sense of deeper domain-specific or niche-specific know-how (in PR lingo, we call it “thought-leadership”). It also proves to be inadequately equipped when it comes to reflecting a certain brand’s voice, tone or values through the content it generates – something that human PR pros are usually adept at.
All the above-mentioned issues and limitations essentially present a compelling argument why today’s PR professionals MUST exercise a lot of caution when using such tools, and MUST NOT take ChatGPT-generated content at its face value (as it is), without it being fact-checked, proofread, and appropriately modified by a skilled PR human.
Final Thoughts: Deciphering the Way Forward
Drawing in from Elon Musk’s remark that ChatGPT is “scary good”, my two cents would be – at least in its current avatar, this tool can be termed both as ‘scary’ and ‘good’, depending on the context where and how it is deployed. The best way forward for India’s PR industry is to combine the power of ChatGPT along with the OG human creativity, judgement and decision-making capabilities to continue delivering the best to clients and other stakeholders.
The lightning-fast pace at which ChatGPT creates content makes it quite enticing for PR pros to use it daily, but it shouldn’t stop us from taking into account the technology’s limitations and potential risks. After all, who better than us, the PR-doers, understand fully that it takes years to build a strong positive reputation, but only seconds to destroy it!
That being said, GPT-4 – the newest version of the software that is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus (paid) subscribers – is way more powerful, accurate, and nuanced than the previous free ChatGPT version based on the GPT 3.5 model. And this only testifies to and points to the obvious – that the AI revolution is here to stay. And so as PR practitioners, we must continuously upgrade and upskill ourselves to stay relevant and derive maximum benefits from the technologies in the up-and-coming era of AI and communications convergence.
The article is authored by PRandit co-founder & COO Shalu Jha.
