Ensuring AI is an asset — not a liability — for your agency
In this episode, Chip and Gini highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls of over-relying on AI for content creation in PR and marketing. They discuss instances of AI-generated content gone wrong, such as the fake book list published by the Chicago Sun-Times and poorly crafted AI-generated pitches. The hosts emphasize the importance of human oversight, individuality, and storytelling in maintaining quality and building relationships with the audience. They also delve into Google’s EEAT guidelines and how PR professionals can leverage their expertise to stand out in search rankings. Finally, they discuss practical ways to efficiently use AI while ensuring the content remains authentic and relatable. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “As we start to try to create mountains of content using AI, we start losing individual perspective, personality, those kinds of things that can help set us apart as agencies and can help set our clients apart.” Gini Dietrich: “Let AI help you draft it and then add in your experience and expertise. That’s where you’ll win every time.” Chip Griffin: “If we’re just churning stuff out because we think that’s the only way to win the future battle of AI search, we’re mistaken.” Gini Dietrich: “AI is absolutely a huge, huge help. It still needs to be fact checked, it still needs oversight.” Related What does ChatGPT and generative AI mean for PR agencies? Is AI writing an agency’s friend or foe? Setting AI policies for your agency View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think I’m just gonna use some AI to spew out all, all sorts of spam for these episodes so that we just, we’re not even part of it anymore. We’re just gonna contribute to this atmosphere of junk content that’s proliferating these days. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I read. As we’re recording this, the Chicago Sun Times got in trouble for publishing a summer reading list made up of real authors, but fake books. And their excuse was, we hired a freelancer to create this. So I was like, oh, that’s akin to saying the intern messed up. You still, especially as a newspaper, have to verify that it’s accurate. So yeah, the list was of books, was all made up. Books that AI had generated for them and they didn’t check it. And then other newspapers picked it up and ran it too. So there’s something to be said for AI’s great for some things, but it still needs human oversight. Chip Griffin: It, it not only needs human oversight, but I think that, you know, one of the things that, that we lose as we start to try to create mountains of content using AI is we start losing individual perspective, personality, those kinds of things that can help set us apart as agencies and can help set our clients apart. Because if, if we’re totally dependent upon AI, obviously hallucinations continue to be an issue, right? And, and yes, and can absolutely cause problems. There are, you know, legitimate fears over inadvertent plagiarism on the part of AI and those sorts of things. And those are all important. But I, I think, I think so much more important is that you start to lose the voice of the agency, the voice of the client if you rely too heavily on AI. And, and I think everybody listens to us, knows that we are fans of the use of AI, right? Yes. In the work that we do, and we should find ways to leverage it in order to be more efficient and all of those kinds of things. And, and, but that’s not saying that you should just contribute to this mountain of content that people are committed to putting out right now, whether it’s on LinkedIn, right? And we see all this AI generated garbage on LinkedIn. Although, yes, just for the record, all these people who post these dumb things about if you have an em dash, it’s AI generated. That is hooey. Gi