Copyright 2023, The Wall Street Journal

AI Can Do as Bad a Job as Your PR Department

News releases these days are full of meaningless nothingisms, which a robot could easily produce.

The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 2023 |  By Joshua Ben Rosen |  photographs by David Paul Morris, Bloomberg News

Since ChatGPT exploded into popular awareness, many businesses have contemplated how they could use it to cut costs. The prospect is particularly enticing for marketing and communications, given that a majority of executives who oversee these functions see content production as one of the most valuable applications of generative artificial intelligence.

Some researchers are predicting that AI eventually could eclipse or even replace employees who perform such time-intensive tasks as assembling reports and writing news releases. But just because AI can churn out large volumes of coherent text doesn’t mean it can take over these responsibilities. The misconception that it could is rooted in the same mindset that has allowed much of the business communications field to stray from its purpose.

Businesses make countless decisions—many are routine, while others, such as mergers and acquisitions, are made only after lengthy deliberations. Aside from competitive secrets, part of an organization’s purpose is to communicate with the public to help outsiders understand the positions and actions it takes. When profits and market share are on the line, the stakes are especially high.

Unfortunately, over the last decade or so companies have been publishing increasingly diluted content to keep pace with faster media cycles. This feed-the-beast mentality has resulted in too many announcements and thought-leadership pieces that are littered with rhetorical nothingisms—generic words and phrases that resemble real thoughts and concepts but fail to convey meaning. These are the textual equivalents of stock imagery.

News releases, for example, constantly refer to a “leading” company taking a “transformative” step that promises to “create synergies,” “amplify differentiators” and benefit “key stakeholders.” Almost without fail, the CEO quoted is “thrilled.”

This isn’t jargon, which refers to special words or abbreviations that can be confusing to those outside a particular field. That’s inside baseball. Rhetorical nothingisms are the opposite. They render a precise thought or concept so accessible that it becomes incomprehensible.

Making AI the ghostwriter for American businesses would exacerbate this problem. Prompted to draft a press release on an acquisition, ChatGPT would draw on a vast number of prior news releases announcing acquisitions, combing the archive of rhetorical nothingisms to produce its own low-caliber content.

Instead of outsourcing communications to AI, businesses should rediscover the reason for the practice—to convey ideas real humans think and explain their actions at a particular moment, in a particular place and under a particular set of circumstances.

Sitting down with decision makers to make sense of their thoughts and then putting those thoughts into words can’t be automated. Humans must do it. Committing to meaningful business communications might mean publishing less content, but that is a small price to pay for trust and credibility.

Companies may have to rely on human-produced content in the long run anyway. If every company starts sending out an endless stream of AI-generated material, the resulting feedback loop will nearly guarantee that all the material will start to sound the same. Originality and authenticity would be the only way to cut through the noise.

Businesses are made up of people. Articulating what they do and why is no project for a robot.