Reimagining the Communications Industry with ChatGPT
Everybody seems to be enthralled with ChatGPT and the technology is indeed impressive. The chatbot is passing all kinds of graduate level exams, and educational institutions are rushing to devise policies to prevent students from cheating on assessments using the program. ChatGPT can even write scientific abstracts and research papers that fool scientists into thinking that they are real reports. Some users, however, have reported that the chatbot cited non-existent academic journal articles as source material.
Amidst all this buzz, we recently conducted our own simple and non-iterative queries to test how the program fares with written texts, which are bread-and-butter products for the communications and PR industry. We noticed that prompts generated texts that included a few paragraphs at most and were short on e.g., persuasive arguments or supporting evidence. In other words, ChatGPT appears ill suited to write a press release about a client’s new product announcement or personnel appointment. Relevant quotes would be missing, while context and the structure of a typical press release might be discarded. The same goes for writing an op-ed piece on a current affairs topic. ChatGPT’s website already acknowledges that the program has “limited knowledge of world and events after 2021.” While context and relevance would be lacking, an authentic voice is also unavailable. Furthermore, ChatGPT might not be able to replace a traditional brainstorming session with a client to generate a creative idea for a new advertising campaign. All these tasks still require a human operator.
Dismissing ChatGPT’s potential role in agency work, however, would be a fatal mistake. Generative AIs will develop rapidly and become better at their tasks. Part of the development will simply derive from the vast content production that happens on the web every second. More content means exponential learning for AI programs like ChatGPT. Additionally, communication professionals will gradually learn the optimal use cases to deploy generative AI technology, and companies will tailor AI products to the communications industry. The sector certainly has a strong incentive to adopt this new technology in today’s productivity focused world. How agencies deploy new tools effectively will largely depend on creating new value propositions for clients.
One first step would be to find use areas where generative AI chatbots work in conjunction with humans. For instance, the chatbot produces a first draft of a text that is then word-smithed by a speechwriter. Or the DALL·E 2 image generator could take a first stab at generating mood boards that are then finessed by a graphic designer. With a rising number of disinformation and misinformation cases infecting the world’s information ecosystems, chatbots could be at the vanguard of flagging unreliable information for human fact checkers. However, for every productive use of the new technology, there is a nefarious side that can be easily conceived and exploited. Some pundits have already warned about chatbots replacing humans in the democratic process through lobbying. Generative texts, for example, could almost instantaneously deliver comments to newspaper articles and on social media, or even influence policymakers.
Whatever one might think about the appeal, capability, or ethical use of the generative AI technology, a new dawn has arrived. As a result, communications professionals (and the larger public) will find it increasingly difficult to navigate a more complex information ecosystem that is being flooded by AI-generated content.
