By James Saville, Partner at Goldbug. James leads media and press strategy across PR campaigns.
This post – we can assure you – was not written by Chat GPT.
Or was it?
How would you know?
If it was, then would we be able to reference culturally trivial, historically unimportant things that occurred pre-internet?
Like that time when Mr Blobby threw a tantrum on Noel’s House Party in the mid 1990s? Or just Noel Edmunds himself? Or when Bros were the biggest band in the country with millions of fans who were called Brosettes who all wore Grolsch beer bottle tops on the laces of their shoes.
Or what the Argos Catalogue meant for consumerism.
The point is, all of these moments create feeling and emotion and shape our experience, whether that’s consciously or sub-consciously.
What is so bad about relying on ChatGPT to do your writing for you? There is a strong argument that it improves it for the majority of people – certainly when it comes down to grammar and spelling.
If you are worried that people will recognise you’ve used AI just because the spelling and punctuation is correct, then you’re directing your fears in the wrong place.
Because great writing that engages people isn’t about where to put a comma or use of the em-dash, it’s about heart and soul.
Chat GPT by its nature is formulaic, balanced and has unrivalled attention to detail.
The great thing about human writing is the imperfection of it all, the vulnerabilities, the lived experience. About starting a sentence with the word ‘About’ even though that means, grammatically, it’s not a sentence.
While we’re flooded by studies for and against over-use of AI in comms, one study from the US showed last year that humans engaged more with content written by humans.
A journalist recently asked whether she used AI to write her stories summed it up well: “Why would a human bother to read something I couldn’t be bothered to write?”
The next steps must surely be a full scientific understanding of where it’s more effective to ask AI to step in to help us…and where human writing is essential.