It is well established that the irreplaceable human touch – that all-important ‘relatability’ – is crucial when it comes to building a brand and winning customers, who are savvier than ever thanks to social media and can spot frauds a mile away.
But what if you’re a company with limited resources that wants to generate marketing or press content but doesn’t have the confidence to employ a PR agency, let alone a full time employee? Maybe an over-stretched executive or company director decides to give AI a whirl to help with producing collateral, newsletter content or press releases. What could possibly go wrong?
You see, the trouble with AI is it is only as good and effective as whoever is briefing and directing it, so if you’re stressed and busy to start with, without the proper time or inclination to devote to instructing the bot, it will churn up a lower – highly derivative and formulaic – degree of output than you could have written yourself. It’s certainly not something you can rely upon to accurately represent, cherish and safeguard your precious brands and company reputation.
It is YOUR ability to communicate that determines the efficacy of any form of AI, which cannot be expected to convey – let alone understand – all the subtle sensitivities and unique selling points of your company and brands. It can’t have a feel for timing or innate sense of truly hot trends because it has no feelings or sensations of its own. You can’t put a finger in the wind to test its direction if you have no fingers!
Then there are the roles that ONLY human beings can fulfil, like delivering speeches to physical audiences, fielding and answering their questions, facilitating round-table discussions, delivering workshops and giving presentations that aren’t mere formulas churned out by rote, but are carefully crafted to hit the target and seal the deal. Would YOU consult a robot on the matters most crucial to your business, or employ an experienced consultant who is a specialist in your chosen field?
It is totally counter-intuitive to rely upon an automaton with no creative power to fulfil what is an essentially creative role which requires a high degree of human discernment and discrimination to perform well and achieve the desired result. It is also of questionable ethics to replace what are essentially human functions with pre-programmed, soulless content harvested from the minds of real life people.
In Part 3 of our series on AI we contrast Utopian goals with Dystopian real world outcomes. Read Part 3 here.