Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!
What You Should Know
How the Journalists You Pitch Are Using AI
AI is often promoted as a boon for coders and customer service chatbots. Communications is on the list of top use cases too, and journalists are increasingly buying in. In Venezuela, where a contentious election just took place, reporters leveraged AI avatars to safely report news under a repressive regime. These digital personas allowed them to cover sensitive topics without risking government persecution. AI can also assist in storytelling beyond the delivery of the news itself.
“It can turn any reporter into a data journalist, which is awesome,” Alex Mahadevan, Director of MediaWise, told Poynter. “Generative AI programs can sort, classify and summarize thousands of pages of documents, show you how to visualize that data and turn it into an interactive chart.”
“If you need to look up what laws are in the Netherlands, which is something we’ve had to do before, a good AI [translation] detector tool can give you a good idea of what something says,” added Katie Sanders, Editor-in-Chief, PolitiFact. “And there are so many now, you can cross reference them to ensure accuracy.”
For PR professionals, understanding these dynamics is crucial. As journalists become more reliant on AI, the way stories are pitched and received might evolve, too.
Look for opportunities to find out how your media contacts are using AI. Maybe with the help of new tools, they’re more interested in data-driven stories, or they’d rather see a full data set from a survey, for example. The more you know about how their role is evolving, the better you’ll be able to help them out. As AI becomes an increasingly valuable tool for both PR pros and journalists, embracing this technology together can lead to more effective storytelling.
Elsewhere …
- Amazon’s New Alexa Voice Assistant to Use Claude AI
- Oprah Winfrey to Host ‘AI And The Future Of Us’ ABC Special
- OpenAI, Anthropic Sign Deals with U.S. Government for AI Research and Testing
- AI May Not Steal Many Jobs After All. It May Just Make Workers More Efficient
- Would you Eat a Pizza Designed by ChatGPT? Pizza Chain’s AI Recipe Proves to Be a Huge Hit
Tips and Tricks
Using Claude’s new selective edit tool
What’s happening: Anthropic’s constitutional AI policy prioritizes safety and testing, which means Claude tends to be behind on new features compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A new Claude feature may look familiar to ChatGPT users: the ability to selectively edit parts of outputs rather than reproducing the whole thing.
Why it matters: If you’re working with longer pieces of content, you may want to only change a few sentences instead of entire paragraphs or sections. Claude’s “Artifacts” capability made it easier to follow iterations by putting outputs on the right side of the screen, separate from your prompt string. This new feature goes a step further (and only seems to be available in Artifacts).
How it works: Once you’ve got an output in Artifacts, you can highlight the text you’re unsure about. A small box will appear next to the text with two options: “Improve” and “Explain.” If you click “Improve,” you’ll be prompted to offer some guidance — maybe you want that text to be more specific or to use a different verb.
Clicking “Explain” auto-prompts Claude “Can you explain this section to me in more detail?” In the response, Claude shows its work and offers insight into the logic of including the selected text. Seeing that explanation can be helpful in your own thought process of whether the text belongs and even spark some inspiration for other pieces of the story you may want to include or remove.
Quote of the Week
“I talk to a lot of journalists who see generative AI as a tool they can opt into or out of, like a buzzy new social network or passing newsroom fad. But that attitude fails to recognize how AI has already fundamentally changed their readers’ experience of the internet and the wider information ecosystem. Those readers, often without knowing it, likely encounter some form of AI-generated content every day. As journalists, we don’t really have the luxury of opting out of the implications there — to authorship, to reliability or to media trust and literacy.”
— Caitlin Dewey, Freelance Journalist, to Poynter on how newsrooms are using AI
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