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Writer's pictureKerrie Smit

Marrying the Robot

Updated: Feb 27

As organisations and governments around the world contend with the big questions of AI security, for the communications professional, auto-generated content is becoming commonplace.


For anyone who's struggled with churning out another 'fresh' paragraph about a subject they've already written from every perspective - our AI interface is our saviour!


A human hand and robot hand typing together on a computer keyboard

But we also know there are significant drawbacks.


We've all read online articles where the tenses don't agree, and words are used out of context. It just doesn't feel written by a journalist with a heartbeat.


Just the Facts

AI interfaces don't actually know anything, and they can't imagine. Language models use mathematics to predict the most likely sequence of words. In other words, they regurgitate content sourced from existing data and apply rules to it. Machine learning is amazing and improving all the time - but communications professionals know we can't rely on generated content carte-blanche. We see this everyday - it's repetitive, can be reductive, too literal, lacking in soul, too blunt and without the nuance we find delicious in really good writing.


I'm pretty sure my Robot confused its synonyms with its antonyms. But only one time. That error was very quickly fixed.

Marry that robot

The comms professional's relationship with AI is like a marriage. Become a power couple with your AI friend. Let them do what they do best - give them your specific parameters and let them churn out the content.


And then, as a comms professional, take one for the humans - do what you do best! Use your beautiful human brain to pick out the problems. Apply your personality, your unique gifts and talents, your imagination, your analytical egg with all its nuance and sense of humour. Edit your robot's output and bring us something incredible.


Finally, and at the risk of consenting to a Robot Apocalypse, let's define this partnership - let's marry the robot. Let's embrace our robot friends as we declare in unison "till death do us part"!


To undertake our online program Getting Started with AI for Communicators in our Academy or for more information, go to agenciachange.com

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