The Do’s and Don’ts of Chat GPT for PR

PR people are loving Chat-GPT just as much as anyone and for a short minute we thought it may even been a content creation killer, helping teams create content without input from communication experts. However, the truth is Chat GPT has simply become a useful research tool to help find more information to pull from vs. creating an abundance of content automagically.

It’s clear from the deluge of users providing feedback that Chat GPT is a great starting point, but as a tech industry professional with AI experience, leveraging AI tools are only as good as the data you put into it. It will still take a lot of human-robot interaction to get Chat GPT to the level of learning it needs to have to produce perfect content. AND with the shifting nature of trends, technology and the news, that may never really be the case.

Nevertheless, using it as a tool definitely has its benefits but there are some key things to keep in mind when leveraging this cool “buzz” tool for PR, marketing and communications purposes. Our team has compiled a short list of considerations. While you may be tempted to use Chat GPT to create your PR content or other communications, here are some Do’s and Don’ts we’ve pulled together along with some ways that our team has been leveraging this handy tool.

• DO get back story on the latest trends: Remember when it comes to thought leadership, you need to assert your expertise and opinion to make the articles original and fresh. We are always reminding clients that to create thought leadership, you really must say something different with your valid points and repeat it. In this case you can leverage Chat GPT to bring up supportive documentation to put some strength behind your viewpoints instead of allowing it to just create opinion that it gathers based on what has already been published, because that’s in fact what it’s gathering and not even always very current.
• DO save time on research: If you’re building materials or trying to read up on a topic that you need to understand quickly then Chat GPT is great for summarizing longer articles and research papers. This can be a big time saver when you’re researching a topic. It can even give you bullet points. Remember Cliff’s Notes? It’s exactly like that but now a human doesn’t have to generate those little booklets and waste paper. A prompt as simple as “give me a bullet point summary of:” and then paste the article is a great way to get info (it doesn’t seem to work as well if you just give it the URL of an article).
• DO Monitoring the competition – Our team regularly conducts media audits to determine share of voice for our partners. Using Chat GPT helps us review a competitor’s website in seconds, find the mission statement, and identify the keywords. Again winning on time savings.
• DO use simple and specific prompts: When you want to get more exact information make sure that you are focusing in on your specific question or prompt so that you can receive the most accurate answers possible. In this case, you get what you put in and the more vague your question or prompt is, the less likely you’ll get the information that you need out.
• DON’T forget to fact check: While the buzz is HOT, remember that Chat GPT doesn’t have access to data after 2021 which can be a hurdle for timeliness and relevance. Again, it can give you great starting points and for topics and research that are not as time sensitive, maybe it won’t matter, but when it comes to PR, data and news, this may make a big difference.
• DON’T forget to check for links and errors: Chat GPT is not error-free Because of the aforementioned limitations, many references have 404 errors, make sure you check links and information. Make sure you are double checking your work.
• DON’T think that Google won’t detect your AI generated content – Last thing before we sign off is to take note  is that in 2022, Google said they do consider AI content spam and a violation of their spam policies when it is used to try to “manipulate a page ranking” – so basically any web facing content. It seems like they don’t want to publicly beat AI up too much because they’re spinning up some things themselves. They’re also historically vague with how much detail they provide around their search algorithms.That said, many mainstream SEO gurus have been doing A/B style testing with human vs ai content and the results in traffic certainly seem to indicate that A) Google has a really good internal tool for AI content detection and B) tends to rank non-ai content higher in SERPS, at least currently.

The world of AI is opening up new ways and opportunities for us to become better practitioners and comb through the world wide web of content and multimedia. The goal is to use these tools responsibly. I celebrate the fact that we have something that can make the research of what we do so much easier so that we can focus on producing content, ideas and creative strategies that make an impact.

Happy searching!