Seeing Through The Mirage of AI Writing

A fundamental question about AI is not whether or not we should be using it in the PR industry, but whether we continue to do the hard work of re-writing, editing and fact checking content.   

In a new article for CommPRO’s AI-focused CoCreations, The AI Mirage of Perfect Grammar, But Imperfect Communications, I highlight the challenge of seeing through perfectly written sentences to the effectiveness of the communication underneath. “Just like a mirage on a desert highway, what we see at a distance is deceptive.”

The idea of the "uncanny valley" is that the closer a robot gets to being human-like a feeling of weirdness grows. No matter how good the tools used there's something slightly off with AI-generated content.  

It's often hard to put a finger on what exactly that is. Generally, AI content looks good, until we really look hard at it using our human writing and story-telling skills. Upon closer inspection, AI-generated text may not only feel wrong, it often is wrong. BBC research notes that major artificial intelligence chatbots are inaccurately summarizing news stories and getting facts wrong 19% of the time.     

While tools are getting better, it’s clear we need to get better at using them. “Plugging in a one-line prompt to free ChatGPT won't generate the best results. We need to look for the best and most focused model for a specific purpose and learn to create the types of highly-structured prompts that generate better results. And, we need to upload examples of our own content to help the AI figure out our style and cadence. But even with these best practices, don’t expect miracles.”

Finely-honed writing and editing skills are essential if we are to turn AI-generated content into press releases, pitches, or fact sheets that “drive human behavior”.

An investor at a technology venture capital event I recently attended shared that, “he could smell AI-generated content that wasn't authentic to the sender.” He told the group it was an instant turn-off. As a member of the board of the Foreign Press Association, I can share that journalists are no different.   

As I write in CoCreations, this isn't just perception. “A recent Stanford study found that AI-generated business pitches were 23% less likely to receive follow-up interest compared to human-written ones, despite being technically perfect.”

We need to recognize that without the work of professional writers and communicators, AI-generated writing will not only fail to engage reporters, but damage PR professionals’ and the industry’s credibility.           

The AI mirage is real. Today it takes seconds to generate an article, email or social post using AI. We must then apply the slow skills of looking closely at content, editing, re-writing and fact checking to ensure that what we generate communicates the intended message for our clients.  

Writers have always employed different approaches and styles when it comes to producing content. There’s no reason why AI should not be part of the PR professional tool kit.

As poet Robert Frost encouraged, when you come to a fork in the road, take the path less traveled. When it comes to writing, the starting point for the path less traveled is seeing through the AI mirage of perfect grammar, but poor communication.                            

Simon Erskine Locke is founder & CEO of communications agency and professional search and services platform, CommunicationsMatch™, a CommPRO partner and columnist. He is also Co-Founder of Tauth.io, a digital content authentication startup, and vice president of the Foreign Press Association. He is an agency founder, and has held head of communications roles at Morgan Stanley, Prudential Financial and Deutsche Bank. CommunicationsMatch’ s technology helps clients search, shortlist and hire agencies and professionals by industry and communications expertise, location, size, diversity and designations. CommunicationsMatch developed the industry’s first integrated agency search and RFP tools, Agency Select™, with RFP Associates. CommunicationsMatch™ powers PRSA’s Find a Firm agency search tools.