AI, PR and the People Choosing Candlelight

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have seen the ongoing debate among PRs on LinkedIn: is AI a force for good in the industry?

There seem to be two camps. The first are those worried that AI is lowering the standard of work, allowing agencies to flood the industry with “generic AI slop”.

On the other side are people asking a pretty reasonable question: what exactly is wrong with using AI if it helps us do the job better?

To be fair, some of the criticism AI has attracted in our industry is justified. Nobody wants to read a press release that sounds like it was written by a robot that has just discovered the phrase “in today’s fast-paced world”.

However, one look at LinkedIn suggests that, for some, simply defending the use of AI is enough to make you part of the problem - as though choosing not to use it is somehow evidence of greater creativity, better judgement or a more authentic approach to PR.

AI isn’t a replacement for experience, judgement or creativity and it shouldn’t be doing the thinking for us. But refusing to use a genuinely useful tool simply because you don’t like what it represents feels a little like choosing to work by candlelight after electricity has arrived: you can still see what you’re doing, but why would you deliberately make it harder?

For me, this is where the conversation around AI in PR gets slightly confused.

There are plenty of things AI can help us do faster and better. Research, interrogating data and pressure-testing ideas are just some of the everyday ways we use it at defined - even getting past the blank page when your brain has decided it has absolutely nothing left to contribute.

Used properly, it can supercharge the work. But don’t mistake that for being able to replace the judgement that sits behind the prompts.

ChatGPT doesn’t know a client in the way you do after months of working with them. Claude doesn’t have the relationship with a journalist that tells you when to pick up the phone rather than send another email. Gemini doesn’t instinctively know that the headline finding in a piece of research is actually quite boring, while the throwaway statistic buried halfway down page 27 is the thing everyone will want to talk about.

That still requires a human - and a human with enough real-world experience to know when the machine is wrong.

If somebody asks AI to write a press release, copies and pastes whatever comes back and sends it out without applying any judgement, then yes, the result will probably be dreadful.

But that isn’t really an argument against AI… it’s an argument against doing a bad job.

Give a powerful tool to someone with good judgement, experience and ideas and it can make them more effective. Give the same tool to someone without those things and you can produce an awful lot of mediocrity very quickly.

And that’s the point.

PR agencies have spent years talking about efficiency, productivity and giving senior people more time to do higher-value work. Then a technology arrives that can genuinely help us do exactly that and suddenly efficiency itself starts to feel suspicious.

If AI can turn an hour of fairly functional work into ten minutes, I don’t see that as a threat to the craft, I see it as an extra 50 minutes I can spend on the things that benefit the client: developing an idea, interrogating the strategy, finding a stronger angle or actually speaking to people.

Clients aren’t paying an agency because a task took four hours instead of 40 minutes. They’re paying for the quality of the thinking and the outcome it produces.

If AI helps me achieve a better result, why wouldn’t I use it?

AI is going to change the way PR works, just as email, social media and digital publishing changed it before. As the tools evolve, the job evolves and visa versa.

Yes, there will be rubbish created with AI. Yes, there will be lazy thinking disguised as efficiency and there will undoubtedly be agencies that use it to cut corners and produce more for less. If the quality suffers as a result, then yes, that that deserves criticism.

But using AI and producing bad work are not the same thing.

The people who get the most from it will be the ones who understand what the technology can do, use it intelligently and then apply the judgement that only comes from actually knowing their craft.

So yes, by all means, keep working by candlelight.

But if we refuse to look at what technology makes possible, we may as well go back to pointing at planes in the sky and calling them metal birds.