Cognitive dissonance: How LLMs might change PR and communications [Public Relations Review Podcast]

If generative AI gets your story wrong, who do you contact to lobby for a correction?

Peter Woolfolk recently had me back on his Public Relations Review podcast: LLMs vs GOOGLE: The Impact on the Future of Public Relations Searches! 

The catalyst for the conversation stemmed from these two posts I had written earlier (See? Print still drives broadcast; just like old times!):

• Are LLMs becoming the new front page for public relations? 
• How can communicators pitch an LLM?

In the same way that Google replaced newspapers as “the new front page,” generative AI has the potential to unseat search.

But there’s a dark side too: Like many in PR, I’m coming to look at the evolving world of generative AI with a bit of cognitive dissonance.

On one hand, it seems incredible and magical. On the other hand, generative AI gives answers very confidently that are often wrong.

In fact, after this podcast interview, Columbia Journalism Review published this statistic about generative AI:

• “Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries.”

If credibility is a key part of relating to the public, such statistics spell trouble for PR.

On the upside, PR (usually) isn’t about life and death. An American Hospital Association newsletter alerted me to this one:

• “A study published yesterday by Nature’s Communication Medicine journal found that some machine learning models trained on existing patient data did not recognize about 66% of injuries that could lead to patient death in the hospital.”

For PR people, generative AI isn’t just about a tool that, despite its accuracy problems at the moment, could improve productivity. It’s also about understanding the technology in case generative AI starts floating incorrect information about your clients or employer. After all, if ChatGPT gets the story wrong, who do you contact to lobby for a correction?

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Image credit: Google Gemni