AI has the potential to change our world beyond recognition. For example, the AI generated picture of the pope in the puffer jacket going viral looked pretty realistic - didn’t it? Or how about the images of Donald Trump being arrested in New York? Or French President Emmanuel Macron running through tear gas amongst the riots in Paris?
These images that went viral were all created entirely by AI, more specifically by Midjourney, a powerful AI software which creates photo-realistic images from text prompts.
It’s becoming increasingly harder and harder for PR and comms professionals to identify what’s real and what’s fake. We will get to a point (if we are not there already!) where we’ll be unable to tell the difference. The images created from these GAN (Generative adversarial networks) and diffusion based models are a sign of what’s to come.
We are fast approaching a world where anything you see in the media, whether it be online, on social media, on TV or even in movies could be fake. In the next five years or so, instead of seeing an image of the pope wearing a puffer jacket, we could be seeing videos of the pope body popping or breakdancing in a puffer jacket - all fully realistic.
Using audio and video that’s so realistic, where no one is able to tell if it is fake or not, is what is on the horizon. And this could be happening much sooner than we think - probably in the next year or so!
Chat GPT is a language-based AI software. It can chat casually with users and generate complex code in seconds, to write essays, create content in languages almost instantly as well as so much more.
Even now in its early days, it’s already smart and developing quickly, that it’s been banned in a number of academic institutions out of concerns for plagiarism. Chat GPT is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming next.
Often, ground-breaking technologies such as Chat GPT start with text. If we think back about a century ago, before TV and radio, there was the telegram. So if we were to draw a parallel to this, Chat GPT is very much the telegram, and what’s coming next will be akin to the development of TV and radio.
When generative AI gets into audio and visuals, that’s where it’s really going to change the world for PR and comms professionals. Even now, with every passing day, images such as the pope in a puffer jacket are becoming more and more sophisticated and harder to detect. The fine line between truth and reality is constantly changing, as the lines between what is actually real, and what is fake are blurred beyond recognition.
The potential for misuse, manipulation and deception is profound, as these videos can be used to exonerate the innocent and even manipulate society.
Many jobs will be affected by the growth of generative AI, in particular in the media sector. We are seeing a massive shift in ways that content is created. As an example, twenty odd years ago, animation software was used by content creators such as animators which revolutionised the way animation was created.
Many people at the time thought it would cost animators their jobs. But consequently, what happened was that the animation industry boomed, and today there are many more jobs in the animation sector than we have seen ever before.
AI isn’t novel tech, but its improved capabilities and recent advancements has taken the world by storm, generating much rhetoric around what its implications are for the job market.
The implications of AI for PR and comms professionals will be both significant and multifaceted. There will be a new breed of PR and comms professionals created because AI is making content so much easier to create and consume.
Whilst AI may not be a substitute for human expertise and creativity, we will still need to play a crucial role in strategic decision-making, building relationships, and managing overall communication strategy.
Adaptation of emerging AI powered technology and tools such as ChatGPT will be essential for the PR and comms sector to stay relevant and maximise the potential benefits automation can offer.
Will AI take your PR or comms job anytime soon? Probably not. Whilst nobody truly knows what’s coming next, one thing I can say with certainty is that its influence will be immense.
By Rick Panesar, Communications Consultant at Hard Numbers
Marco González June 17th, 2023, in the evening
The takes on this article are too naive to be taken seriously, and I'd expect this not to be Creativepool's view. Comparing animation tools to generative AI isn't accurate in any way. The former are indeed just tools to improve and facilitate the animators' work, while the latter are built to replace artists, writers and other creatives by stealing their work. So not only does gen AI take our work without permission (nor credit or compensation), it's also built so that anyone can fiddle with the stolen work (unknowingly or not) to make synthetic substitutes of what we'd normally do. Even if some people or companies would still prefer the original (or keeping at least one artist to "fix" the outputs, which would still leave countless without a job), not few would settle for just good enough, even if the results are clearly poor for the trained eye. And even if this wasn't the result, the truth keeps being that the only way for gen AI to work as it does is by having huge dataset of scraped material. This isn't to say this article is ok with that fact, but simply being open to embrace the tech as just another new advancement is too blind to the many issues of it, not to mention there are already plenty of cases of it taking jobs.