Human Storytelling in the AI Age
(W)right On Communications President and Founder Julie Wright spoke with the San Diego Business Journal on the value of human storytelling in the AI age.
San Diego Business Journal Editor-in-Chief Jeff Clemetson interviewed Julie Wright for its annual Public Relations issue in January focusing on human storytelling in the AI age,. We’ve shared highlights below. You can learn more on this subject by visiting our AI PR strategies for brands webpage or read the article in its entirety on the paper’s website (for subscribers only):
“People don’t want to be fed music generated by AI, actors that are generated by AI and copywriting that is generated by AI,” said Julie Wright, president of (W)right On Communications.
Artificial intelligence is powered by large language models (LLMs) that are incredibly fast writers but tend to write in the same voice, which, Julie explained, leads to a “race to the middle,” pointing to the volume of obviously AI-written LinkedIn posts.
“It is becoming very noticeable, and that’s a turn off,” she said. “I think humanized storytelling based on lived experience, based on ethical judgement and based on emotional intelligence is really the new skillset.”
“LLMs, they just know what word comes after the other word – they are a statistical, mathematical writer,” Wright said. “They are not writers that understand meaning and purpose.”
LLMs use their vast training data to generate content, but even LLMs have developed writing crutches, she said, resulting in AI-generated content sounding the same and being easy to spot. For instance, you’ll often see the structure: “it’s not this, it’s that; it’s not x it’s y.”
“It sounds really good; it sounds like a pundit. But when everybody’s writing in that style, what happens to your brand voice? What happens to your theme messages? Are you being mindful and curating the things that make you unique?”
The interview also covered what’s happening with Google AI Overviews and AI chatbot answers that are steering traffic away from lists of blue links and resulting in falling organic search traffic to websites. This trend is elevating the importance of public relations as a strategy for influencing AI answers through consistent, clear, authoritative, structured, original and fresh content. These are all things that public relations does exceptionally well.
“The impact of AI answer engines is that we’re living in a zero-click world,” Wright said. “Now there’s this new, slightly enigmatic world of AI answer engines where being in the Top 10 search engine results is going to help you, but it’s not everything.”
PR professionals are adapting quickly to provide GEO, or generative engine optimization. Agencies like (W)right On Communications are helping their clients earn visibility with through optimized content in digital press releases and newswires, carefully structured FAQs and explainers and consistent subject matter bios to help feed the LLMs the technical and textual content they like to consume.
“So quality content matters but credible authority is beginning to matter even more, and I think those two things are where public relations really shines,” she said. “To me, [GEO is] like SEO and PR had a baby – she’s beautiful; she has great structured content; and also really strong authority and credibility signals.”
As AI technology has improved, with new releases of ChatGPT, for instance, clients are more accepting of its value to accelerate results and processes, but they still expect the human element in the storytelling. (W)right On Communications has a clear AI usage policy that protects its clients’ and agency data from training AI models and also clearly requires human oversight and accountability for all AI-generated or -assisted content.
“I don’t think any agency’s clients are paying their agency to have ChatGPT write for them,” she said. “That’s one of the first rules of AI – to have your own guardrails in place.”
