We have been watching with interest the recent buzz around ChatGPT, and in keeping with the latest trend of speculating on its potential impact on various sectors and professions, we asked it what effect it might have on financial PR and communications.
The response from ChatGPT was, unsurprisingly, that its impact could be significant “by automating the generation of certain types of written content, such as financial reports, press releases, and investor communications. This could potentially save time and resources for financial PR and communications professionals, allowing them to focus on more strategic and creative tasks.”
In its rather unnervingly self-aware way, ChatGPT reminded us that it is simply a tool and “not designed to replace the human judgement, creativity and ethics” and that important areas “such as personal interactions and relationship building … are difficult to automate and still require human expertise.” One would hope so. The thought of clients discussing over lunch the finer points of their media relations strategy with an AI bot leaves a lot to be desired.
The description of its own constraints in dealing with human-to-human relations has been trained into ChatGPT as the same proviso pops up in many media articles across different sectors. For example, when asked if it will take over the financial advice industry and make advisers redundant, ChatGPT responded,
while advanced language models like ChatGPT can play a role in the financial advice industry, it is unlikely that they will entirely replace human financial advisers. Financial advice is a complex field that requires expertise and experience, and human financial advisers are still the best option to provide the tailored advice that clients need.
Though we were at first unsettled by the idea that clients could soon be using models such as this one to, say, generate press releases, it was allayed by the fact that ChatGPT, at least in its current form, draws from a snapshot of data with a lag of at least one year. This means AI would most likely find it difficult to generate current and timely material which is a core area of expertise in our profession. Though, with Microsoft’s recent $14b in investment in OpenAI, that may soon change.
We asked ChatGPT a more specific question about PR and communications: What are some of the ways financial PR can manage the campaign of a fund manager that has internally conflicting views on its media approach? Disappointingly, its seven-point list response was too generic to bother reproducing here.
Margaret Simons spent the summer exploring the future of journalism in the face of ChatGPT and came to two conclusions: 1) journalists have more reason than ever before not to behave like bots. Only their humanity can save them, and 2) robot-generated journalism will never sustain the culture wars.
Simons concedes robots will inevitably transform journalism while noting many of AI’s glaring problems. For example, ChatGPT was unaware of any war taking place in Ukraine (because, again, its datasets are frozen in 2021). She offers a salve that equally applies to professionals in the PR and comms space:
Do the job better. Interview people. Go places. Observe. Discover the new or reframe the old. Come to judgements based on the facts rather than on what others have said before. Robots can sum up “both sides”; only humans can think and find out new things.
“If all you have is clichés then you might as well use a robot,” she concludes. “You might as well be one.”
And while it’s too early to draw conclusions, we have to say that if the huge, sudden interest in ChatGPT—both financial and professional—is anything to go by, it is that, like the early World Wide Web, we ignore it at our own peril.
Postscript: We asked ChatGPT to come up with a title for this post. Its response: “ChatGPT: The Future of Financial PR”. Fair enough. That’ll mostly work.