Why AI Won’t Replace Your PR Department Anytime Soon

Will AI replace your PR department? 

Well, not any­time soon — espe­cially if it will require the sin­gu­lar­ity.

But must AI become that soph­ist­ic­ated to begin repla­cing PR depart­ments? A

AI is rap­idly evolving, and with Google’s deep-learn­ing GPT‑3 (gen­er­at­ive pre-trained trans­former) and AI image-gen­er­at­ing tools like Midjourney, AI is already hard at work writ­ing texts and pro­du­cing images.

Still, mas­ter­ing the human lan­guage and passing the Turing test is a tall order.

Here’s why:

Why Human Language is Unique

Most anim­als have some capa­city for communication. 

For anim­als with a high­er degree of sen­tience, com­mu­nic­a­tion can be con­nec­ted to extern­al con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions; a tribe of mon­keys could have a dis­tinct and dis­tin­guish­able sound for “danger approach­ing”, for instance. ¹Early human lan­guages were prob­ably advanced forms of semi­ot­ics where the sounds them­selves sig­ni­fy abstract mean­ings.

However, about 75,000 years ago, humans sur­passed this level in a rel­at­ively short evol­u­tion­ary time span. 

We moved on from aud­ible com­mu­nic­a­tion to using human lan­guage, a skill that dif­fer­en­ti­ates us from all oth­er life forms on our planet. 

In this in-depth con­ver­sa­tion, the lin­guist Noam Chomsky explains why lan­guage is unique to humans:

The Mystery of Human Language

Understanding the vast dif­fer­ence between a mon­key’s use of dis­tinct sounds and human lan­guage is import­ant. Or, more accur­ately — how little we under­stand about this difference.

We don’t know how or why we developed our skills for human lan­guage so quickly. 

We don’t know how and why it became so pre­val­ent in pre­sum­ably all hom­in­ids at the time. 

We don’t know how the skill of human lan­guage evolved — only that it did. 

And it does­n’t seem likely that lan­guage skill was selec­ted over enough gen­er­a­tions to pro­duce such a fast bio­lo­gic­al res­ult. There are oth­er com­plex and fas­cin­at­ing products of evol­u­tion, like the eye. 

But in nature, eyes have been around mil­lions of years and have developed into thou­sands and thou­sands of dif­fer­ent varieties. 

We’re stuck with a sci­entif­ic sample size of one; humans.

Neoteny: Apes with Juvenile Features

One inter­est­ing the­ory sug­gests a muta­tion in which a spe­cif­ic breed of hom­in­ids, our early ape-like ancest­ors, suffered from a devel­op­ment mal­func­tion in which the infant hom­in­id brain kept developing. 

According to the the­ory, human beings are over­grown “ape chil­dren.” This would par­tially explain our more juven­ile fea­tures (“neoteny”), the lack of fur, and our weak­er bodies. 

More import­antly, the the­ory could explain why our brain sud­denly grew many mag­nitudes of its pri­or capacity:

“For dec­ades sci­ent­ists have noted that mature humans phys­ic­ally resemble imma­ture chimps — we, too, have small jaws, flat faces and sparse body hair. The reten­tion of juven­ile fea­tures, called neoteny in evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy, is espe­cially appar­ent in domest­ic­ated anim­als — thanks to human pref­er­ences, many dog breeds have puppy fea­tures such as floppy ears, short snouts and large eyes. Now genet­ic evid­ence sug­gests that neoteny could help explain why humans are so rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from chim­pan­zees, even though both spe­cies share most of the same genes and split apart only about six mil­lion years ago, a short time in evol­u­tion­ary terms.”

Mapping the Brain: 200 – 500 Years Away

A pop­u­lar expres­sion states that we know more about the sur­face of the moon than we know of the floor of the sea. 

Well, we’re closer to know­ing what’s going on in our oceans than map­ping out a cluster of bio­lo­gic­al neur­ons to under­stand how they pro­duce con­scious­ness — and human language. 

It’s dif­fi­cult to sci­en­tific­ally test how human lan­guage is affect­ing our brains. It’s pos­sible that inner dia­logue (intern­al lan­guage use) is closely con­nec­ted to com­plex phe­nom­ena like con­scious­ness.

Decoding the human brain is neces­sary to cre­ate an AI cap­able of repla­cing human language.

The fam­ous Turing test is a sen­ti­ment to this effect: 

Are we able to pro­duce a talk­ing machine able to trick a human being? Despite it being a chal­lenge, such a task is minus­cule com­pared to the chal­lenge of con­struct­ing a machine that uses lan­guage the way we humans star­ted using it about 75,000 years ago. 

We have mapped out the human gen­ome, but we’re still far from fig­ur­ing out how it all works. Even at expo­nen­tial growth, we might be at least 200 – 500 years away from being able to map out (and under­stand) the neur­al work­ings of a human brain. 

A com­pet­ing hypo­thes­is is that human­ity will ven­ture far into transhuman­ism (humans aug­men­ted through tech­no­logy), a cyber­net­ic renais­sance, long before we can suc­cess­fully decode human lan­guage through AI. 

It’s likely that we will fuse humans and machines and cre­ate a human API long before we can pass the Turing test.

The Singularity: 2062 ± 8 years

So, will AI replace your PR depart­ment any­time soon?

The answer seems to be a def­in­ite “no” if we by AI mean achiev­ing mas­ter­ing human com­mu­nic­a­tion. Such AI cap­ab­il­it­ies might require a tech­no­lo­gic­al sin­gu­lar­ity—which comes with its own dis­turb­ing chal­lenges (where keep­ing our jobs is not one of them).

It also depends on what we mean by “soon.”

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has fam­ously pre­dicted that the sin­gu­lar­ity will occur in 2045, and oth­ers have argued stat­ist­ic­ally that this might be “optim­ist­ic” and that it should occur in 2060 – 65 ± 10 years (later spe­cified to 2062 ± 8 years).

However, this is where we lose full con­trol over tech­no­lo­gic­al advance­ments in a way that pro­hib­its us from ever going back, which is not to guar­an­tee sen­tient com­puters able to com­mu­nic­ate suc­cess­fully with humans.

ANI vs AGI

The chal­lenges of mas­ter­ing lan­guage run deep with­in the AI com­munity, surely. But if you think that AI won’t trans­form the PR industry, you’d be mistaken.

There’s a vast dif­fer­ence between the AI sin­gu­lar­ity (which is the one the pub­lic typ­ic­ally fear) or AGI (arti­fi­cial gen­er­al intel­li­gence) and ANI (arti­fi­cial nar­row intelligence). 

Eleonora Terzi, whose dis­ser­ta­tion in MA, Public Relations, Advertising and Applied Communication is focused on AI in PR, writes:

“… we are cur­rently liv­ing in the age of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): all the tools and instru­ments that have been suc­cess­fully developed so far belong to a stage of weak AI. AI that matches human cap­ab­il­it­ies — or even sur­passes them — is a long way from us, and it is pure spec­u­la­tion so far. Nonetheless, even at this stage, AI has already star­ted mak­ing its impact on a lot of indus­tries — such as fin­an­cial ser­vices, law, health­care — and PR is no excep­tion. Two years ago, the CIPR’s Humans Still Needed study found that 12% of a PR practitioner’s total skills (out of 52 skills) could be com­ple­men­ted or replaced by AI today, with a pre­dic­tion that this could climb to 38% with­in five years.”

And Jean Valin Hon FCIPR, Principal of Valin Strategic Communications, writes:

“AI is about to massively change our lives. The pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion needs to keep up. We need more exper­i­ence with these tools and more crit­ic­al reviews to learn how best to use them and their lim­it­a­tions. Regardless of the tasks and skills that can be auto­mated or bene­fit from AI, human inter­ven­tion, edit­ing, sens­it­iv­ity, emo­tion­al intel­li­gence, apply­ing good judge­ment and eth­ics will always be needed.”

For the next 20 years, the main tech­no­lo­gic­al drivers impact­ing your PR depart­ments will be a com­bin­a­tion of sev­er­al impact­ful AI trends:

In sum­mary: It’s not that your com­mu­nic­a­tion depart­ment will be replaced by ANI per se, but that few­er com­mu­nic­at­ors will be needed to per­form com­plex tasks efficiently.

Kerry Sheehan, chair of the AIinPR Panel, writes:

“Be it through improved auto­ma­tion and AI-enabled tools for many areas includ­ing, media mon­it­or­ing, social map­ping and listen­ing, stake­hold­er man­age­ment, pro­gramme and pro­ject man­age­ment, auto­mated con­tent for a range of intern­al and extern­al pur­poses, includ­ing mov­ing busi­ness, organ­isa­tions and brands towards more owned con­tent and becom­ing their own news pub­lish­ers, or vir­tu­al, con­ver­sa­tion­al assist­ants, chat­bots or cur­at­ors. […] It goes without say­ing where the media goes, PR must keep up.”

PR Resource: How AI Will Impact PR

PR Beyond AI

Whenever I’m asked what I do for a liv­ing, I reply, “I help organ­isa­tions to com­mu­nic­ate bet­ter.” That, to me, has always felt like an accur­ate and mean­ing­ful answer.

But pro­gress is unavoidable. 

As the AI Revolution makes its pres­ence felt, I think about what ‘com­mu­nic­at­ing bet­ter’ will mean as we move forward.

I’m won­der­ing:

Replacing Humans — A Good or Bad Idea?

During the Industrial Revolution, soci­ety under­went three dis­tinct phases:

Based on the three phases of the Industrial Revolution, we can see that whatever comes after­wards is a nat­ur­al out­come of the indus­tri­al­isa­tion process.

The res­ult was­n’t ter­rible. The AI Revolution may lead to sim­il­ar outcomes.

How AI Will Impact PR (Probably)

Overall, AI’s impact on the PR industry is likely to be sig­ni­fic­ant, with the poten­tial to revolu­tion­ise many aspects of how PR pro­fes­sion­als work and inter­act with stake­hold­ers, influ­en­cers, and pub­lics.

There are sev­er­al ways in which arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) is likely to impact the pub­lic rela­tions (PR) industry. 

Here are a few examples:

More IT = We Need More (Not Less) PR Skills

Historically, soci­et­al pro­gress has often meant that humans have been freed to think, com­mu­nic­ate, and cre­ate. And it’s usu­ally in these rare and inspired times of enlight­en­ment that we take great strides towards dis­cov­er­ing mean­ing, cre­at­ing art, and under­stand­ing the universe.

For bet­ter or worse, pub­lic rela­tions is a lub­ric­ant for the inter­face between the indus­tri­al sys­tems and real people engaged in pro­du­cing and consuming. 

This is how PR pro­fes­sion­als have found their role in the great­er scheme of soci­et­al development.

This is likely how we’ll find our foot­ing bey­ond AI, too.

In a post-AI soci­ety, human-to-human com­mu­nic­a­tion skills will likely be as val­ued as they are today. Perhaps even more.

Read also: PR Beyond AI

PR Resource: The Electronic Age

Enter: The Electronic Age

Human cul­ture is often described based on our access to pro­duc­tion tech­no­lo­gies (e.g., the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age).

According to Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication Theory, a bet­ter ana­lys­is would be to view soci­et­al devel­op­ment based on the prom­in­ence of emer­ging com­mu­nic­a­tions technologies.

McLuhan’s Four Epochs

McLuhan sug­gests divid­ing human civil­isa­tion into four epochs:

“The Gutenberg Galaxy is a land­mark book that intro­duced the concept of the glob­al vil­lage and estab­lished Marshall McLuhan as the ori­gin­al ‘media guru’, with more than 200,000 cop­ies in print.”
Source: Modern Language Review ³McLuhan, M. (1963). The Gutenberg galaxy: the mak­ing of typo­graph­ic man. Modern Language Review, 58, 542. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​2​3​0​7​/​3​7​1​9​923

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al and lin­guist, I sub­scribe to the concept of the Electronic Age. I firmly believe soci­ety is unlikely to revert to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Like the rest of soci­ety, the PR industry must com­mit to digit­al-first, too. Mark my words: It’s all-in or bust.

Read also: The Electronic Age and the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy