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The rise of AI has transformed industries across the board, and Digital PR is no exception. In our latest blog post, AI Revolution: How Digital PRs Can Navigate an Ever-Changing Industry, Chloe Chamberlain, Senior Digital PR Strategist at Distinctly, delves into how PRs can adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI. As the co-author of the Integrating AI Processes into Digital PR whitepaper, Chloe shares valuable insights on leveraging AI tools, staying ahead of trends, and ensuring that technology enhances rather than replaces the human touch in PR strategies.
What we’ll cover in this blog post:
The risks of AI biases, inaccuracies, and copyright issues in PR
Why PR teams need clear guidelines and training for using AI responsibly
How AI is shaping the future of SEO and journalism, and what PR pros need to know
Key takeaways for integrating AI into your PR workflow while maintaining the human touch
Generative AI dominated headlines throughout 2023, transforming industries across the board - including digital PR. Less than three months after launch, ChatGPT-3.5 had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, with an estimated 123 million monthly active users.
Earlier this year, Google integrated their new feature ‘AI overview’ into the SERPs – transforming digital PR and SEO as we know it. Love it or hate it, the feature is here to stay and will continue to evolve. While it may be seen as another feature in the SERPs for organic rankings to compete with, it's important to instead embrace it as an opportunity to appear at the very top of the results page.
Of course, many PR practitioners have heard of and used large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini but half of practitioners use AI irregularly in the workplace. It’s unsurprising as large language models often require very tailored prompts to gain useful responses – but there are some handy AI tools out there that eliminate prompting efforts, such as Ahrefs AI writing tools and Distinctly’s Headline Grabber.
Top Ways to Successfully Use AI for PR Campaigns and Workflows
One of the most valuable benefits of artificial intelligence in PR is its ability to boost efficiency. In the fast-paced, high-pressure world of digital PR, where time and accuracy are critical, AI can support teams in various ways. From generating new ideas to streamlining everyday tasks, here are some key ways to successfully integrate AI into PR workflows:
Boosting Creativity in Ideation
AI can be a useful tool when you’re struggling with ideation. Whether you’re brainstorming new press release angles or trying to craft engaging subject lines, AI tools can provide fresh ideas and help break through creative blocks.
💡Use AI for rapid-fire idea generation when planning your next PR campaign. Feed it initial ideas and allow it to suggest multiple angles or approaches to refine.
Improving Writing Efficiency
AI can help generate first drafts for content like press releases, email pitches, and headlines. Although some human editing will always be needed, AI saves time by providing a strong starting point, speeding up the writing process.
💡 Use tools like Ahrefs’ AI writing tools to generate content outlines or rough drafts, allowing you to focus more on fine-tuning and editing.
Data-Driven Campaign Insights
AI is particularly useful when compiling and analysing data for PR stories. It can help sift through large datasets, identify trends, and highlight key insights that make for compelling, data-driven narratives. Whether you’re creating a story based on industry statistics or survey results, AI can simplify the process, allowing you to focus on storytelling.
💡 Use AI to scan industry reports, surveys, and statistics to help identify emerging trends and insights for your next data-driven PR campaign.
To demonstrate how seamlessly AI can integrate with PR tasks, I conducted a test to see if people could identify the human-written headline in a group of AI-generated ones. The outcome? No one could tell the difference, highlighting how well AI can blend into everyday PR work.
Ways People Are Negatively Using AI In The PR Industry
While it can be tempting to rely on AI for every aspect of our job, there’s a reason why we’re still employed. Our ability to apply empathy, intuition, and nuanced thinking to campaigns is something AI simply can’t replicate.
The Risks of AI Bias and Inaccuracies
Humans aren’t perfect, and neither is AI. Insufficient and biased training data can cause AI to hallucinate – providing inaccurate information, creating fake websites and studies, and making false assumptions when analysing data.
It’s essential that digital PRs always double-check AI outputs as well as our inputs. For example, unfortunately, gender biases still exist in the workforce and when Amazon trained AI on successful technical employee CVs, many of the AI-vetted applications excluded women. Digital PRs need to be aware of AI’s biases and stereotypes when creating campaigns.
The Copyright Risks of AI-Generated Images
Digital PRs could also potentially face issues around the copyright of using AI images. While AI-generated images are not considered the work of a human creator and cannot be copyrighted, the images AI tools are trained on to be able to produce images ‘from scratch’ may be subject to copyright. In 2023, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against the company behind the AI art tool ‘Stable Diffusion’, alleging it used copyrighted images to train software.
How To Train and Set Boundaries for AI Use
To prevent these issues around using AI, the perception and understanding of its capabilities needs to change. While AI can be used in many different ways, that doesn’t always mean it should be. Digital PRs, and everyone looking to incorporate AI into their workflow, need to be trained on how to use AI and how not to use it. Creating an AI policy for your company is a good place to start.
The Future of AI in Digital PR: What PR Pros Need to Know
Already, publication houses have started to adopt AI assistance for their journalists. In some cases, there have been wholesale changes in job roles such as ‘AI editors’ to cover AI news or AI-assisted reporters. If used correctly, AI will be a tool which gives journalists more time to engage with top headline stories, and in turn, PR stories. A significant development at Newsquest is the implementation of a ‘Newscreator tool‘, which is said to be similar to employing AI as a hyper-efficient copywriter. The tool is used to ‘transform’ information to create first drafts, which can be verified and finalised by the journalist.
Artificial Intelligence Optimisation (AIO) will become a large focus in the near future. With Google’s ‘AI Overview’ now taking up a large portion of the results page for informational search terms before we even reach the first organic ranking, it’s important for digital PRs to create and promote content that's optimised for AI overviews. This means having content hosted on the brand’s websites and using it to gain coverage and links in a mixture of authoritative national and industry publications.
Because of this, it’s likely that digital PR campaigns will have a revival, with websites hosting on-site material moving from optional to essential. If the reactive approach is your bread and butter it’ll be important to have publications link to relevant information on your website, rather than just the homepage, to ensure that content on your website can be scraped and linked to by Google’s AI Overview.
Key Takeaways You Can Use Today
AI boosts efficiency, but human creativity is irreplaceable - Use AI to support, not replace, your work.
Watch out for AI biases and inaccuracies - Always fact-check AI-generated outputs to avoid misinformation.
Be mindful of copyright with AI-generated images - Avoid potential legal issues by using licensed or original content.
AI is great for data-driven PR stories - Use AI to uncover insights from large datasets and create compelling narratives.
Prepare for AI in SEO and journalism - Optimise your content for AI-driven search results and stay ahead of AI-assisted journalism trends.
Develop an AI policy for your team - Set clear guidelines on when and how to use AI effectively in your PR workflow.
Most AI, as we currently know it, still functions primarily as a large language model and, thankfully, can’t do our jobs for us.
AI is a great time saving resource to bounce ideas off of and I encourage every digital PR to get comfortable doing this. Use it regularly, honing your prompts to gain more effective answers to help fast track your work. But remember AI is just as flawed as the humans who created it, so always view every AI output with a healthy dose of scepticism – just as you would when listening to that questionable relative at a family gathering.
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