AI can help us do the work. It shouldn’t help us pretend to be someone we’re not.

Artificial intelligence has become part of the everyday conversation in public relations, and increasingly, part of our everyday work. I’m using it to brainstorm new ideas, summarize complicated information, develop first drafts and help me think differently about a particular challenge. Used responsibly, AI makes us faster and more efficient. But there is an important distinction between using technology to assist the work and allowing technology to replace the trust that makes the work possible.

I’ve talked about this many times. Trust and credibility have to be at the center of everything we do. We ask our clients to trust our counsel. We ask journalists to trust that the information and sources we provide are legitimate and factual. We ask community partners and the public to believe that we are communicating openly and accurately. And if that trust is called into question, the consequences extend far beyond a single email, pitch or campaign.

Adrian and I discussed this again on Copper State of Mind – communications professionals ultimately have to land in the same place, regardless of how quickly technology changes: trust and credibility.

That’s why a conversation about responsible AI use shouldn’t be the tools we can or cannot use. It should begin with transparency. There is nothing inherently unethical about using AI to help research a topic, tighten copy or identify a new way to tell a story. The question is whether the technology is helping a real person do better work or creating an impression that isn’t true. AI should make the human better, not manufacture the human.

Disclosure is part of that conversation, too, although I don’t believe every use of AI requires an announcement. If I use a tool to help organize my thoughts or improve a sentence, that is very different from allowing technology to communicate on my behalf in a way that leads someone to believe they are interacting with me when they aren’t. We already accept automated technology in plenty of places because we know what it is. When a chatbot pops up on a website we understand that we are interacting with technology.

Our clients have entrusted us with their reputations. As their representatives, our decisions become their decisions in the eyes of the people we communicate with. That means efficiency cannot be the only measure of whether an AI application is appropriate. We also need to ask whether the client would be comfortable with how we are using it, whether it accurately represents who is doing the work and whether we would be comfortable explaining the process to a journalist, client or colleague. If the answer to any of those questions is no, that should tell us something.

There’s no question that AI saves time. So perhaps the more appropriate question is what we do with all the time AI promises to save us. If technology gives a PR professional five hours back, the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to send hundreds more emails. Maybe those five hours are better spent thinking more strategically, learning more about a client’s business, understanding what a reporter actually covers, having conversations and building relationships. Those are the things that make our work valuable, and they are also the things that are difficult to automate.

AI will continue to evolve, and our policies and practices will have to evolve with it. There will be gray areas, new applications and plenty of situations we haven’t anticipated yet. But the principle doesn’t have to be complicated.

• Use technology to improve the work, not to obscure who is doing it.
• Be transparent when transparency matters.
• Protect the human relationships that sit at the heart of good communications.

AI may help us work faster, but trust is something we still have to earn ourselves.

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