Artificial intelligence “is inevitable,” said Kami Huyse, APR. For communicators, “The key is to understand how AI can enhance what you do, rather than replace what you do.”
Huyse, CEO of Zoetica, a digital marketing and PR agency in Houston, was the guest on Nov. 14 on Strategies & Tactics Live, PRSA’s LinkedIn livestream. At PRSA’s ICON 2023 in Nashville, Tenn., in October, she led a session titled “Unlocking the Power of Human-centric AI to Help Elevate Your Content.”
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s award-winning Strategies and Tactics publication and host of S&T Live, asked Huyse whether she’s concerned about the quality of content being created by artificial intelligence.
People are already starting to recognize content that “sounds like AI,” she said. The technology “will put out an entire paragraph and all the sentences will be about the same length.” Text generated by AI often contains filler words and adverbs and uses the passive voice, she said.
Just as people were hesitant to join Twitter when it launched in 2006, with AI there’s an adoption curve, she said. Artificial intelligence “is a tool that’s coming whether you want it to or not.”
At PR agencies, carefully consider contracts “so clients understand what you’re doing with AI and what you’re not doing with it,” she said. “The question becomes: How much do you need to disclose and when do you need to disclose it?”
In the near future, PRSA will release guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in public relations, Elsasser said. (Updated: You can find the AI guidance at this link.)
AI needs context.
With AI, “you have to give it context,” she said. Some AI tools, such as the keyboard shortcut Voilà for Google Chrome, have already been trained to use certain writing voices, such as a technology voice or a marketer voice.
For now, “ChatGPT is probably your best bet” as an AI tool for public relations professionals, she said. “You can get it for free and start there. You can put your voice into ChatGPT” and then use it to write texts for you. In the “custom directions” section, you tell the application “exactly what you need it to do.”
Huyse, who said she has conversations with AI, has instructed ChatGPT to use less formulaic sentences, to adopt her preferred tone of voice and whether to write in the first, second or third person.
“You can tell it, ‘I need an email, a headline.’” Only have AI write part of an article, she advises. “If you say, ‘Write this entire article for me,’ it will always be bad.”
When using AI, “You can create something that’s in your voice, so that the AI can speak like you,” she said. “That’s one of the things you want to learn, is how to put context around AI. It only has the judgment that we put into it — or that it learns from all the information and mistakes that have been fed into it.”
You can watch the playback on LinkedIn here.
