If you work in tech right now, the chatter around ChatGPT and generative AI will be all over your social echo chamber. The Microsoft-backed OpenAI platform is – let’s be honest – impressive. Here’s my two cents based on what it can do so far, and the implications on PR agencies as we see its capabilities unfold.
For us tech nerds, generative AI is not a totally new phenomenon. All of us have championed the future of AI in our day-to-day work – and we have done this for years. We knew generative AI was coming.
And yet we’re all so dazzled by its capabilities. When you experience it first-hand, you realise just how many barriers it breaks down. It will change the way we approach information-gathering (watch out tech giants!), and crucially, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with that information. It’s our ongoing digital assistant doing a lot of the thinking and production for us, and has the potential to change our behaviours completely.
So how much thinking can it do and where does it challenge PR agencies to go further?
If you want to work in a PR agency, most agencies say they want you to possess excellent writing skills, which tends to require (but not exclusively) a higher education. With ChatGPT in the mix and evolving, you’ll see that more PR agencies will need to see (even more) evidence of original thinking, and how candidates have developed a storyline idea using creative thought. Because ultimately, that skill is what will differentiate the tech clients in a sea of sameness, and client partners expectations will fundamentally change now ChatGPT is doing its thing.
This requirement has implications across the board, particularly the skills debate around the future of work, and how our educational systems need to evolve so PR agencies are filled with creative thinkers. It will also transform how agencies train home-grown candidates to have that extra creative edge.
Because fundamentally, ChatGPT challenges PR agencies to be even more creative with their thinking. Two worlds are colliding: what’s happened before and what needs to be said next.
ChatGPT collates and narrates original thoughts and summarises them based on a data knowledge base that ends in 2021 (right now). It’s a great tool to use in the agency arsenal if you want to audit what original ideas have gone before (as long as you fact check manually and ask the right questions). But what it can’t do is develop original, future-looking, creative PR strategies for you and your tech brand that are unique to what makes you special, and your business objectives.
So no, it can’t do a better job than your PR agency. Its knowledge base is too restrictive, it doesn’t possess future-looking, original thought, and it can’t develop creative ideas.
But what it does do is demand more specific skills (and quite rightly) of your PR agency. Otherwise clients will say more and more: “I can use ChatGPT to say something like that”.
Every brand deserves original, creative ideas. At Made By Giants, it’s part of our creative pledge to our client partners. At Made By Giants, we promise not to take other people’s ideas and repurpose them.
If you receive lukewarm writing that sounds like what everyone else has been saying for ages, then you need to review your PR agency. Or use ChatGPT instead.
Fancy a chat with us? Drop us an email at onesmallstep@madebygiants.io for a better chat than your chat with ChatGPT.