Ragan and PR Daily’s 2024 Social Media Conference kicked off Wednesday with a memorable pre-conference workshop slate. During an afternoon session, Mackenzie Perna, co-founder at Sun & Sol Co., and Tyler Paget, social media director at Fox Racing, did a deep dive into how organizations can create impactful short-form content on TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

Here’s what we learned.

Establishing an ownable identity

Perna began by sharing how brands can create an ownable identity to show they’re truthful by embracing truth in various ways.

“We recommend that brands take on a very editorial approach and show their human community truth,” she said. “If we look around, we’re all diverse in ages and ethnicities, in what we like to do on the weekends. And consumers are looking at some of this from their brands as well. So when you’re programming your content showing diversity in your audience, and what you’re providing in regards to the entertainment and content, you’re sharing consumer truth. We all want to trust the brands that we’re purchasing from as well as the content we’re investing our time into.”

“The days of speaking through a one-way megaphone are over,” Perna added. “We really want to dig in.”

Lead with the hook

It’s important to remember that the hook is everything on TikTok — and action should come first. “Jump into a scene — don’t set it,” said Paget, emphasizing that this will encourage your audience to join you in the scene – and stay with you..

Some examples of effective hooks include:

• “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but..”
• “This is for you if [describe your target audience’s needs]”
• “Stop scrolling if you [describe your target audience] who [desire or dislike]”
• “Here’s 5 things to [desire]”
• “You need to do this if you [desire]”
• “Here’s a hack to [banish/attract]”
• “Did you know that…”
• “5 mistakes you are probably making…”

Optimizing your content

Creating a great video is only the beginning. When you’re putting the finishing touches on a piece of content, make sure you’re also considering:

• Showcasing premium content by staying in safe zones. “There’s a lot of stuff going on on your screen, a lot of business with engagement icons … making sure your content is within that safe zone is very pertinent,” Paget said. Checking preview mode can help here.
• Leveraging audio and voiceover to create an immersive expereince. Remember that TikTok started its life under the nameas Musical.ly, and music is still rooted in its DNA. Leveraging royalty- free, in-app music is the best way to go here.
• Optimizing keywords. These should be optimized in your profile, text on screen, caption and copy. “Social media has really become a search engine,” said Perna.
• Alt-text. Right before hitting post, you can find alt-text in your settings and add a description for what the content you’re sharing looks and feels like. This helps people with disabilities access and enjoy your content.

Telling a story and being a human

A 2024 Sprout Social Report found that most customers want to see more humans show up on brand social accounts.Front-line employees, social media teams, community employees and corporate leaders were most desired.

When spotlighting these employees, it’s crucial to not overthink it or try to be flawless. Accept that the aesthetics won’t be perfect and don’t stress having a strict storyline. Shakiness will happen, as will spelling mistakes and background noise. “If anything, it’ll cause chaos in the comment section, which is great for engagement,” Paget said with a smirk.

When to step in and when to stay out of trends

Just because a trend is happening on TikTok doesn’t mean you should be jumping in. Finding trends requires being an active participant. “Whether you’re on your lunch break or you’re having your morning coffee, just scroll through your brand’s account,” Perna said. “See what your community’s talking about. See what sounds and formats and conversations are happening in real time and allow this to be applied to your strategy on a daily basis. This allows your team to be quick and reactive.

When determining whether to jump into a trend,ask yourself:

• Is it authentic? 90% of consumers say that authenticity matters when choosing brands to support, from retail to healthcare to higher ed and beyond.
• Is it relevant? Citing Gary Vaynerchuk, Paget reminded us that good content is not about selling your content or services — it’s about understanding culture to decide when you can enter relevant conversaitons taking place online.
• Is it memorable? Visual appeal, evoking emotions and leaning on the tenets of storytelling will help you get there.

“If you answer no to any of these questions, consider sitting out of that trend,” Perna said.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. He oversees the editorial strategy for Ragan across brands and products.

The post Live from Ragan’s Social Media Conference: Optimizing your short-form video content appeared first on PR Daily.

AI continues to shape our world in ways big and small. From misleading imagery to new attempts at regulation and big changes in how newsrooms use AI, there’s no shortage of big stories.

Here’s what communicators need to know. 

AI risks and regulation

As always, new and recurring risks continue to emerge around the implementation of AI. Hence, the push for global regulation continues.

Consumers overwhelmingly support federal AI regulation, too, according to a new survey from HarrisX. “Strong majorities of respondents believed the U.S. government should enact regulation requiring that AI-generated content be labeled as such,” reads the exclusive feature in Variety. 

But is the U.S. government best equipped to lead on regulation? On Wednesday, the European Parliament approved a landmark law that its announcement claims  “ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation.” It is expected to take effect this May.

The law includes new rules banning applications that threaten citizen rights, such as biometric systems collecting sensitive data to create facial recognition databases (with some exceptions for law enforcement). It also requires clear obligations for high-risk AI systems that include “critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services, certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management,” and  “justice and democratic processes,” according to the EU Parliament.

The law will also require general-purpose AI systems and the models they are based on to meet transparency requirements in compliance with EU copyright law and publishing, which will include detailed summaries of the content used for training. Manipulated images, audio and video will need to be labeled.

CNBC reports:

Dragos Tudorache, a lawmaker who oversaw EU negotiations on the agreement, hailed the deal, but noted the biggest hurdle remains implementation.

“The AI Act has pushed the development of AI in a direction where humans are in control of the technology, and where the technology will help us leverage new discoveries for economic growth, societal progress, and to unlock human potential,” Tudorache said on social media on Tuesday.

“The AI Act is not the end of the journey, but, rather, the starting point for a new model of governance built around technology. We must now focus our political energy in turning it from the law in the books to the reality on the ground,” he added. 

Legal professionals described the act as a major milestone for international artificial intelligence regulation, noting it could pave the path for other countries to follow suit.

Last week, the bloc brought into force landmark competition legislation set to rein in U.S. giants. Under the Digital Markets Act, the EU can crack down on anti-competitive practices from major tech companies and force them to open out their services in sectors where their dominant position has stifled smaller players and choked freedom of choice for users. Six firms — U.S. titans Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and China’s ByteDance — have been put on notice as so-called gatekeepers.

Communicators should pay close attention to U.S. compliance with the law in the coming months, diplomats reportedly worked behind the scenes to water down the legislation.

“European Union negotiators fear giving in to U.S. demands would fundamentally weaken the initiative,” reported Politico.

“For the treaty to have an effect worldwide, countries ‘have to accept that other countries have different standards and we have to agree on a common shared baseline — not just European but global,’” said  Thomas Schneider, the Swiss chairman of the committee.

If this global regulation dance sounds familiar, that’s because something similar happened when the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, an unprecedented consumer privacy law that required cooperation from any company operating in a European market. That law influenced the creation of the California Consumer Privacy Act two years later. 

As we saw last week when the SEC approved new rules for emissions reporting, the U.S. can water down regulations below a global standard. It doesn’t mean, however, that communicators with global stakeholders aren’t beholden to global laws.

Expect more developments on this landmark regulation in the coming weeks.

As news of regulation dominates, we are reminded that risk still abounds. While AI chip manufacturer NVIDIA rides all-time market highs and earned coverage for its competitive employer brand, the company also finds itself in the crosshairs of a proposed class action copyright infringement lawsuit just like OpenAI did nearly a year ago. 

Authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Steward O’Nan allege that their works were part of a datasite NVIDIA used to train its NeMo AI platform. 

QZ reports:

Part of the collection of works NeMo was trained on included a dataset of books from Bibliotik, a so-called “shadow library” that hosts and distributes unlicensed copyrighted material. That dataset was available until October 2023, when it was listed as defunct and “no longer accessible due to reported copyright infringement.”

The authors claim that the takedown is essentially Nvidia’s concession that it trained its NeMo models on the dataset, thereby infringing on their copyrights. They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the U.S. whose copyrighted works have been used to train Nemo’s large language models within the past three years.

“We respect the rights of all content creators and believe we created NeMo in full compliance with copyright law,” a Nvidia spokesperson said.

While this lawsuit is a timely reminder that course corrections can be framed as an admission of guilt in the larger public narrative,  the stakes are even higher.

A new report from Gladstone AI, commissioned by the State Department, consulted experts at several AI labs including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta offers substantial recommendations for the national security risks posed by the technology. Chief among its concerns is what’s characterized as a “lax approach to safety” in the interest of not slowing down progress,  cybersecurity concerns and more.

Time reports:

The finished document, titled “An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI,” recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power. The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the “frontier” of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also “urgently” consider outlawing the publication of the “weights,” or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward “alignment” research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

On the ground level, Microsoft stepped up in blocking terms that generated violent, sexual imagery using Copilot after an engineer expressed their concerns to the FTC.

According to CNBC:

Prompts such as “pro choice,” “pro choce” [sic] and “four twenty,” which were each mentioned in CNBC’s investigation Wednesday, are now blocked, as well as the term “pro life.” There is also a warning about multiple policy violations leading to suspension from the tool, which CNBC had not encountered before Friday.

“This prompt has been blocked,” the Copilot warning alert states. “Our system automatically flagged this prompt because it may conflict with our content policy. More policy violations may lead to automatic suspension of your access. If you think this is a mistake, please report it to help us improve.”

This development is a reminder that AI platforms will increasingly put the onus on end users to follow evolving guidelines when we publish automated content. Whether you work within the capabilities of consumer-optimized GenAI tools or run your own, custom GPT, sweeping regulations to the AI industry are not a question of “if” but “when”.

Tools and use cases 

Walmart is seeking to cash in on the AI craze with pretty decent results, CNBC reports. Its current experiments surround becoming a one-stop destination for event planning. Rather than going to Walmart.com and typing in “paper cups,” “paper plates,” “fruit platter” and so on, the AI will generate a full list based on your needs – and of course, allow you to purchase it from Walmart. Some experts say this could be a threat to Google’s dominance, while others won’t go quite that far, but are still optimistic about its potential. Either way, it’s something for other retailers to watch.

Apple has been lagging other major tech players in the AI space. Its current biggest project is a laptop that touts its power for other AI applications, rather than developing its own. But FastCompany says that could change this summer when Apple rolls out its next operating systems, which are all but certain to include their own AI. 

FastCompany speculates that a project internally dubbed “AppleGPT” could revolutionize how voice assistant Siri works. It also may include an AI that lives on your device rather than in the cloud, which would be a major departure from other services. They’ll certainly make a splash if they can pull it off.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini rollout has been anything but smooth. Recently the company restricted queries related to upcoming global elections, The Guardian reported. 

A statement from Google’s India team reads: “Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses.” The Guardian says that even basic questions like “Who is Donald Trump?” or asking about when to vote give answers that point users back to Google searches. It’s another black eye for the Gemini rollout, which consistently mishandles controversial questions or simply sends people back to familiar, safe technology.

But then, venturing into the unknown has big risks. Nature reports that AI is already being used in a variety of research applications, including generating images to illustrate scientific papers. The problems arise when close oversight isn’t applied, as in the case of a truly bizarre image of rat genitalia with garbled, nonsense text overlaid on it. Worst of all, this was peer reviewed and published. It’s yet another reminder that these tools cannot be trusted on their own. They need close oversight to avoid big embarrassment. 

AI is also threatening another field, completely divorced from scientific research: YouTube creators. Business Insider notes that there is an exodus of YouTubers from the platform this year. Their reasons are varied: Some face backlash, some are seeing declining views and others are focusing on other areas, like stand-up comedy. But Business Insider says that AI-generated content swamping the video platform is at least partly to blame:

Experts believe if the trend continues, it may usher in a future where relatable and authentic friends people used to turn to the platform to watch are fewer and far between. Instead, replaced by a mixture of exceedingly high-end videos only the MrBeasts of the internet can reach and sub-par AI junk thrown together by bots and designed to meet our consumption habits with the least effort possible.

That sounds like a bleak future indeed – and one that can also change the available influencers available to partner on the platform.

But we are beginning to see some backlash against AI use, especially in creative fields. At SXSW, two filmmakers behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once” decried the technology. Daniel Scheinert warned against AI, saying: “And if someone tells you, there’s no side effect. (AI’s) totally great, ‘get on board’ — I just want to go on the record and say that’s terrifying bullshit. That’s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff.”

Thinking carefully about responsible AI use is something we can all get behind. 

AI at work

As the aforementioned tools promise new innovations that will shape the future of work, businesses continue to adjust their strategies in kind.

Thompson-Reuters CEO Steve Hasker told the Financial Times that the company has “tremendous financial firepower” to expand the business into AI-driven professional services and information ahead of selling the remainder of its holding to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

“We have dry powder of around $8 billion as a result of the cash-generative ability of our existing business, a very lightly levered balance sheet and the sell down of [our stake in] LSEG,” said Hasker. 

Thompson-Reuters has been on a two-year reorg journey to shift its services as a content provider into a “content-driven” tech company. It’s a timely reminder that now is the time to consider how AI fits not only into your internal use cases, but your business model. Testing tech and custom GPTs as “customer zero” internally can train your workforce and prepare a potentially exciting new product for market in one fell swoop. 

A recent WSJ feature goes into the cost-saving implications of using GenAI to integrate new corporate software systems, highlighting concerns that the contractors hired to implement these systems will see bottom-line savings through automation while charging companies the same rate. 

WSJ reports:

How generative AI efficiencies will affect pricing will continue to be hotly debated, said Bret Greenstein, data and AI leader at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It could increase the cost, since projects done with AI are higher quality and faster to deliver. Or it could lead to lower costs as AI-enabled integrators compete to offer customers a better price.

Jim Fowler, chief technology officer at insurance and financial services company Nationwide, said the company is leaning on its own developers, who are now using GitHub Copilot, for more specialized tasks. The company’s contractor count is down 20% since mid-2023, in part because its own developers can now be more productive. Fowler said he is also finding that contractors are now more willing to negotiate on price.

Remember, profits and productivity are not necessarily one in the same. Fresh Axios research found workers in Western countries are embracing AI’s potential for productivity less than others – only 17 % of U.S. respondents and 20% of EU said that AI improved productivity. That’s a huge gap from the countries reporting higher productivity, including 67% of Indian respondents, 65% in Indonesia and 62% in the UAE.

Keeping up and staying productive will also require staying competitive in the global marketplace. No wonder the war for AI talent rages on in Europe.

“Riding the investment wave, a crop of foreign AI firms – including Canada’s Cohere and U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI – opened offices in Europe last year, adding to pressure on tech companies already trying to attract and retain talent in the region,” Reuters reported. 

AI is also creating new job opportunities. Adweek says that marketing roles involving AI are exploding, from the C-suite on down. Among other new uses:

Gen AI entails a new layer of complexity for brands, prompting people within both brands and agencies to grasp the benefits of technology, such as Sora, while assessing its risks and ethical implications.

Navigating this balance could give rise to various new roles within the next year, including ethicists, conversational marketing specialists with expertise in sophisticated chatbots, and data-informed strategists on the brand side, according to Jason Snyder, CTO of IPG agency Momentum Worldwide.

Additionally, Snyder anticipates the emergence of an agency integration specialist role within brands at the corporate level.

“If you’re running a big brand marketing program, you need someone who’s responsible for integrating AI into all aspects of the marketing program,” said Snyder. “[Now] I see this role in in bits and pieces all over the place. [Eventually], whoever owns the budget for the work that’s being done will be closely aligned with that agency integration specialist.”

As companies like DeepMind offer incentives such as restricted stock, domestic startups will continue to struggle with hiring top talent if their AI tech stack isn’t up to the standard of big players like NVIDIA.

“People don’t want to leave because when you don’t have anything when they have peers to work with, and when they already have a great experimentation stack and existing models to bootstrap from, for somebody to leave, it’s a lot of work,” Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of Perplexity, told Business Insider, 

“You have to offer such amazing incentives and immediate availability of compute. And we’re not talking of small compute clusters here.”

Another reminder that building a competitive, attractive employer brand around your organization’s AI integrations should be on every communicator’s mind. 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what matters appeared first on PR Daily.

Ai continues hurtling forward, bringing with it new promise and new peril. From threats to the world’s elections to hope for new kinds of jobs, let’s see how this technology is impacting the role of communicators this week.

Risks

2024 is likely the biggest election year in the history of the world. Nearly half the planet’s inhabitants will head to the polls this year, a major milestone. But that massive wave of humanity casting ballots comes at the precise moment that AI deepfakes are altering the information landscape, likely forever.

In both India and Indonesia, AI is digitally resurrecting long-dead politicians to weigh in on current elections. A likeness of M Karunanidhi (date of death: 2018), former leader of India’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, delivered an 8-minute speech endorsing current party leaders. Indonesian general, president and strongman Suharto (date of death: 2008) appeared in a social media video touting the benefits of the Golkar party.

Neither video is intended to fool anyone into thinking these men are still alive. Rather, they’re using the cache and popularity of these deceased leaders to drum up votes for the elections of today. While these deepfakes may not be overtly deceptive, they’re still putting words these men never spoke into their virtual mouths. It’s an unsettling prospect and one that could pay big dividends in elections. There’s no data to know how successful the strategy might be – but we’ll have it soon, for better or worse.

Major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Adobe and TikTok all intend to sign an “accord” that would hopefully help identify and label AI deepfake amid these vital elections, the Washington Post reported. It stops short of banning such content, however, merely committing to more transparency around what’s real and what’s AI.

“The intentional and undisclosed generation and distribution of deceptive AI election content can deceive the public in ways that jeopardize the integrity of electoral processes,” the accord says.

But while the intentions may be good, the technology isn’t there yet. Meta has committed to labeling AI imagery created with any generative tool, not just its own, but they’re still developing the tools. Will transparency catch up in time to act as a safeguard to this year’s many elections? 

Indeed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits that it’s not the threat of artificial intelligence spawning killer robots that keep him up at night – it’s how everyday people might use these tools. 

“I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong,” Altman said during a video call at the World Governments Summit.

One example could be this technology for tracking employee’s Slack messages. More than 3 million employees at some of the world’s biggest companies are already being observed by Aware AI software, designed to track internal sentiment and preserve chats for legal reasons, Business Insider reported. It can also track other problematic behaviors, such as bullying or sexual harassment.

The CEO of Aware says its tools aren’t intended to be used for decision-making or disciplinary purposes. Unsurprisingly, this promise is being met with skepticism by privacy experts.

“No company is essentially in a position to make any sweeping assurances about the privacy and security of LLMs and these kinds of systems,” said Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute at New York University.

That’s where we are right now: a state of good intentions for using  technology that is powerful enough to be dangerous, but not powerful enough to be fully trusted. 

Regulation, ethics and government oversight

The push for global AI regulation shows no signs of slowing, with notable developments including a Vatican friar leading an AI commission alongside Bill Gates and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Melonin to curb the influence of ChatGPT in Italian media, and NVIDIA CEO  Jensen Huang calling for each country to cultivate its own sovereign AI strategy and own the data it produces. 

“It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data,” Huang told UAE’s Minister of AI Omar Al Olama earlier this week at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

In the U.S., federal AI regulation took several steps forward last month when the White House followed up on its executive order announced last November with an update on key, coordinated actions being taken at the federal level. Since then, other federal agencies have followed suit, issuing new rules and precedents that promise to directly impact the communications field.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officially banned AI-generated robocalls to curb concerns about election disinformation and voter fraud. 

According to the New York Times:

“It seems like something from the far-off future, but it is already here,” the F.C.C. chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said in a statement. “Bad actors are using A.I.-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities and misinform voters.”

Those concerns came to a head late last month, when thousands of voters received an unsolicited robocall from a faked voice of President Biden, instructing voters to abstain from voting in the first primary of the election season. The state attorney general office announced this week that it had opened a criminal investigation into a Texas-based company it believes is behind the robocall. The caller ID was falsified to make it seem as if the calls were coming from the former New Hampshire chairwoman of the Democratic Party.

This is a vital area for communicators to monitor, and to clearly and proactively send messages on how to spot scams and identify real calls and emails from your organization from the fake. Don’t wait until you’re being spoofed – communicate now. 

Closer to the communicator’s purview is another precedent expressed in recently published guidelines by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that states it will only grant its official legal protections to humans, citing Biden’s aforementioned Executive Order in claiming that “patents function to incentivize and reward human ingenuity.”

The guidance clarifies that, though inventions made using AI are not “categorically unpatentable,” the AI used to make them cannot be classified as the inventor from a legal standpoint. This requires at least one human to be named as the inventor for any given claim – opening their claim to ownership up for potential review if they have not created a significant portion of the work.

Organizations that want to copyright or patent work using GenAI would do well to codify their standards and documentation for explaining exactly how much of the work was created by humans. 

That may be why the PR Council recently updated its AI guidelines  “to include an overview of the current state of AI, common use cases across agencies and guidance on disclosure to clients, employee training and more.” 

The Council added that it created a cross-disciplinary team of experts in ethics, corporate reputation, digital, and DE&I to update the guidelines.

 The updates state:

• A continuum has emerged that delineates phases in AI’s evolution within firms highlights its implications for serving clients, supporting teams and advancing the public interest. 

• While AI use cases, especially among Creative teams, has expanded greatly, the outputs are not final, client-ready work due to copyright and trademark issues and the acknowledgment that human creativity is essential for producing unique, on-strategy outputs. 

• With AI being integrated into many existing tools and platforms, agency professionals should stay informed about new capabilities, challenges and biases. 

• Establishing clear policies regarding the use of generative AI, including transparency requirements, is an increasing need for agencies and clients. This applies to all vendors, including influencer or creator relationships. 

• Despite predictions that large language models will eliminate hallucinations within 18 months, proper sourcing and fact-checking remain crucial skills. 

• Experts continue to advise caution when inputting confidential client information, due to mistrust of promised security and confidentiality measures.  
• Given the persistent risk of bias, adhering to a checklist to identify and mitigate bias is critical. 

These recommendations function as a hyperlocal safeguard for risk and reputation that communicators can own and operationalize throughout the organization. 

Tools and Innovations

AI’s evolution continues to hurtle ahead at lightning speed. We’re even getting rebrands and name changes, as Google’s old-fashioned sounding Bard becomes the more sci-fi Gemini. The new name comes with a new mobile app to enable to AI on the go, along with Gemini Advanced, a $19.99/month service that uses Google’s “Ultra 1.0 model,” which the company says is more adept at complex, creative and collaborative tasks.

MIT researchers are also making progress on an odd issue with chatbots: their tendency to crash if you talk to them for too long. You can read the MIT article for the technical details, but here’s the bottom line for end users: “This could allow a chatbot to conduct long conversations throughout the workday without needing to be continually rebooted, enabling efficient AI assistants for tasks like copywriting, editing, or generating code.”

Microsoft, one of the leading companies in the AI arms race, has released three major trends it foresees for the year ahead. This likely adheres to its own release plans, but nonetheless, keep an eye on these developments over the next year:

• Small language models: The name is a bit misleading – these are still huge models with billions of data points. But they’re more compact than the more famous large language models, often able to be stored on a mobile phone, and feature a curated data set for specific tasks. 
• Multimodal AI: These models can understand inputs via text, video, images and audio, offering more options for the humans seeking help.
• AI in science: While many of us in comms use AI to generate text, conduct research or create images, scientists are using it to improve agriculture, fight cancer and save the environment. Microsoft predicts big improvements in this area moving forward. 

AI had a presence at this year’s Super Bowl, though not as pronounced as, say, crypto was in 2022. Still, Microsoft’s Copilot product got an ad, as did some of Google’s AI features, Adweek reported. AI also featured in non-tech brands like Avocados from Mexico (GuacAImole will help create guac recipes) and as a way to help Etsy shoppers find gifts.

But AI isn’t just being used as a marketing tool, it’s also being used to deliver ads to viewers. “Disney’s Magic Words” is a new spin on metadata. Advertisers on Disney+ or Hulu can tie their advertising not just to specific programs, but to specific scenes, Reuters reported. This will allow brands to tailor their ads to fit the mood or vibe of a precise moment. No more cutting away from an intense, dramatic scene to a silly, high-energy ad. This could help increase positive brand sentiment by more seamlessly integrating emotion into programmatic ad choices.

AI at work 

The question of whether or not AI will take away jobs has loomed large since ChatGPT came on the scene in late 2022. While there’s no shortage of studies, facts and figures analyzing this trend, recent reports suggest that the answer depends on where you sit in an organization.

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal points to recent layoffs at companies like Google, Duolingo and UPS as examples where roles were eliminated in favor of productivity automation strategies, and suggests that managers may find themselves particularly vulnerable.

The report reads:

“This wave [of technology] is a potential replacement or an enhancement for lots of critical-thinking, white-collar jobs,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Since last May, companies have attributed more than 4,600 job cuts to AI, particularly in media and tech, according to Challenger’s count. The firm estimates the full tally of AI-related job cuts is likely higher, since many companies haven’t explicitly linked cuts to AI adoption in layoff announcements.

Meanwhile, the number of professionals who now use generative AI in their daily work lives has surged. A majority of more than 15,000 workers in fields ranging from financial services to marketing analytics and professional services said they were using the technology at least once a week in late 2023, a sharp jump from May, according to Oliver Wyman Forum, the research arm of management-consulting group Oliver Wyman, which conducted the survey.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. “Job postings on LinkedIn that mention either AI or generative AI more than doubled worldwide between July 2021 and July 2023 — and on Upwork, AI job posts increased more than 1,000% in the second quarter of 2023, compared to the same period last year,” reports CNBC. 

Of course, as companies are still in an early and experimental phase with integrating AI into workflows, the jobs centered around them carry a high level of risk and uncertainty. 

That may be why efforts are afoot to educate those who want to work in this emerging field.

Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Google pledged €25 million to help Europeans learn how to work with AI. Google accompanied the announcement by opening applications for social organizations and nonprofits to help reach those who would benefit most from the training. The company also expanded its online AI training courses to include 18 languages and announced “growth academies” that it claims will help companies using AI scale their business.

“Research shows that the benefits of AI could exacerbate existing inequalities — especially in terms of economic security and employment,” Adrian Brown, executive director of the Centre for Public Impact nonprofit collaborating with Google on the initiative, told Reuters. 

“This new program will help people across Europe develop their knowledge, skills and confidence around AI, ensuring that no one is left behind.”

While it’s unclear what industries or age demographics this initiative will target, one thing’s certain: the next generation workforce is eager to embrace AI.

A 2024 trends rport from Handshake, a career website for college students, found that 64% of tech majors and 45% of non-tech majors graduating in 2024 plan to develop new skills that will allow them to use gen AI in their careers.

“Notably, students who are worried about the impact of generative AI on their careers are even more likely to plan on upskilling to adapt,” the report found.

These numbers suggest that there’s no use wasting time to fold AI education into your organization’s learning and development offerings. The best way to ease obsolescence concerns among your workforce is to integrate training into their career goals and development plans, standardize that training across all relevant functions and skill sets, then make it a core part of your employer brand.

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what’s next appeared first on PR Daily.

As the first month of the new year ends, there is no shortage of AI news for communicators to catch up on.

This week, we’ll look at the growing threat of AI deepfakes, clarity on how Washington’s seemingly glacial measures to regulate AI for businesses will apply in practice, along with new tools, initiatives and research that can foster a healthy and non-dystopian future with your AI partners, both in and out of work.

Risks

Many of the fears about deepfakes and other deceptive uses of AI came home to roost in the past few weeks. Most notably, X was flooded with non-consensual, explicit AI-generated photos of Taylor Swift. There was so much content that the social media platform temporarily removed the ability to search for the star’s name in an attempt to dampen its reach.

The scale and scope of the deepfakes – and Swift’s status as one of the most famous women in the world – catapulted the issue to the very highest echelons of power. “There should be legislation, obviously, to deal with this issue,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cited the incident as part of a need for “all of the guardrails that we need to place around the technology so that there’s more safe content that’s being produced. And there’s a lot to be done and a lot being done there,” Variety reported. 

But the problem extends far beyond any one person. Entire YouTube ecosystems are popping up to create deepfakes that spread fake news about Black celebrities and earn tens of millions of views in the process. 

Outside of multimedia, scammers are scraping content from legitimate sites like 404 Media, rewriting it with generative AI, and re-posting it to farm clicks, sometimes ranking on Google above the original content, Business Insider reported. Unscrupulous people are even generating fake obituaries in an attempt to cash in on highly searched deaths, such as a student who died after falling onto subway tracks. The information isn’t correct, and it harms grieving families, according to Business Insider. 

That pain is real, but on a broader level, this fake content also threatens the bedrock of the modern internet: quality search functions. Google is taking action against some of the scammers, but the problem is only going to get worse. Left unchecked, the problem could alter the way we find information on the internet and deepen the crisis of fake news.

And unfortunately, the quality of deepfakes keeps increasing, further complicating the ability to tell truth from fiction. Audio deepfakes are getting better, targeting not only world leaders like Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, but also more minor figures like a high school principal in Maryland. 

These clips reanimate the dead and put words into their mouths, as in the case of an AI-generated George Carlin. They are also coming for our history, enabling the creation of authentic-seeming “documents” from the past that can deeply reshape our present by stoking animus. 

It’s a gloomy, frightening update. Sorry for that. But people are fighting to help us see what’s real, what’s not and how to use these tools responsibly, including a new initiative to help teens better understand generative AI. And there are regulations in motion that could help fight back. 

Regulation and government oversight 

This week, the White House followed up on its executive order announced last November with an update on key, coordinated actions being taken at the federal level. 

“The Order directed sweeping action to strengthen AI safety and security, protect Americans’ privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, advance American leadership around the world, and more,” the statement reads.

The statement goes on to explain the convening of a White House AI council, which will include top federal officials from a range of departments and agencies. These agencies have completed all of the 90-day actions they were tasked with and made progress toward other, long-term directives.

“Taken together, these activities mark substantial progress in achieving the EO’s mandate to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems while catalyzing innovation in AI and beyond,” the statement continues.

Regulatory steps taken to mitigate safety and security risks include:

• Activating the Defense Production Act to require that AI systems developers report “vital information” like AI safety test results to the Department of Commerce.
• A proposed rule from the Department of Commerce would require U.S. cloud computing companies to report if they are providing AI training to foreign clients.
• Risk assessments around AI’s use in critical infrastructure sectors. These were conducted by nine agencies including the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Focusing on the mandated safety tests for AI companies, ABC News reports:

The software companies are committed to a set of categories for the safety tests, but companies do not yet have to comply with a common standard on the tests. The government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology will develop a uniform framework for assessing safety, as part of the order Biden signed in October.

Ben Buchanan, the White House special adviser on AI, said in an interview that the government wants “to know AI systems are safe before they’re released to the public — the president has been very clear that companies need to meet that bar.”

Regulatory steps to “innovate AI for good” include:

• The pilot launch of the National AI Research Resource, managed by the U.S. National Science Foundation as a catalyst for building an equitable national infrastructure to deliver data, software, access to AI models and other training resources to students and researchers. 
• The launch of an AI Talent Surge program aimed at hiring AI professionals across the federal government. 
• The start of the EducateAI initiative, aimed at funding AI educational opportunities for K-12 and undergraduate students. 
• The funding of programs aimed at advancing AI’s influence in fields like regenerative medicine. 
• The establishment of an AI Task Force specific to the Department of Health and Human Services will develop policies and bring regulatory clarity to how these policies can jumpstart AI innovation in healthcare. 

While the previous executive order offered suggestions and recommendations, these directives on AI mark the first tangible set of actions and requirements issued by the Biden-Harris administration. As the ABC coverage notes, however, the absence of a common standard for evaluating these systems for safety still leaves many questions. 

For now, communicators can take inspiration from the style and structure of this fact sheet – note the chart summarizing specific actions of agencies, even though the text is too small to read without zooming in.

Expect to hear more in the coming weeks about what AI business leaders learn from these safety and security mandates. Clarity and transparency on these processes may be slow coming, but these requirements amount to progress nonetheless. 

Because this regulation may also shed light on how certain companies are safeguarding your data, what we learn can also inform which programs and services your comms department decides to invest in. 

Tools and initiatives

China put its AI building into overdrive, pumping out 40 government-approved large language models (LLMs) in just the last six months, Business Insider reported, including 14 LLMs in the past week. 

Many of the projects come from names known in the U.S. as well: Chinese search giant Baidu is the dominant force, but cellphone makers Huawei and Xiaomi are also making a splash, as is TikTok owner Bytedance. Bytedance caused controversy by allegedly using ChatGPT to build its own rival model, and creating a generative audio tool that could be responsible for some of the deepfakes we discussed earlier. 

It’s unclear how much traction these tools might get in the U.S.: Strict government regulations forbid these tools from talking about “illegal” topics, such as Taiwan. Additionally, the U.S. government continues to put a damper on Chinese AI ambitions by hampering the sale of semiconductors needed to train these models. But these Chinese tools are worth watching and understanding as they serve one of the biggest audiences on the planet. 

Yelp, long a platform that relied on reviews and photos from real users to help customers choose restaurants and other services, will now draw from those reviews with an AI summary of a business, TechCrunch reported. In an example screenshot, a restaurant was summarized as: “Retro diner known for its classic cheeseburgers and affordable prices.” While this use of AI can help digest large amounts of data into a single sentence, it could also hamper the human-driven feel of the platform in the long run. 

Copyright continues to be an overarching – and currently unsettled – issue in AI. Some artists are done waiting for court cases and are instead fighting back by “poisoning” their artwork in the virtual eyes of AI bots. Using a tool called Nightshade, artists can use an invisible-to-humans tag that confuses AI, convincing them, for instance, that an image of a cat is an image of a dog. The purpose is to thwart image-generation tools that learn on artwork they do not have own the copyright for – and to put some control back into the hands of artists.

Expect to see more tools like this until the broader questions are settled in courts around the world. 

AI at work

There’s no shortage of research on how AI will continue to impact the way we work.

A recent MIT Study, “Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?” suggests that AI isn’t replacing most jobs yet because it hasn’t been a cost-effective solution to adopt across an enterprise.

“While 36% of jobs in U.S. non-farm businesses have at least one task that is exposed to computer vision,” the study reads,  “only 8% (23% of them) have a least one task that is economically attractive for their firm to automate.”

“Rather than seeing humans fade away from the workforce and machines lining up, I invite you to envision a new scenario,” AI expert, author, and President/CEO of OSF Digital Gerard “Gerry” Szatvanyi told Ragan in his read on the research.

“Instead, picture increased efficiency leading to higher profits, which might be reinvested in technology, used to raise worker wages, or applied to training programs to re-skill employees. By and large, employees will enjoy the chance to learn and grow because of AI.”

A recent Axios piece supports Szatvany’s vision, with reporter Neil Irwin identifying a theme emerging in his conversations with business leaders: “That AI-driven productivity gains are the world’s best hope to limit the pain of a demographic squeeze”:

“The skills required for every job will change,” Katy George, chief people officer at McKinsey & Co., told Axios. The open question, she said, is whether “we just exacerbate some of the problems that we’ve seen with previous waves of automation, but now in the knowledge sector, as well.”

While avoiding a “demographic squeeze” is a noble goal, focusing on the use cases that can streamline productivity and improve mental health continues to be a practical place to start. One organization answering this call is Atrium Health, which launched a pilot AI program focused on improving operational efficiency and minimizing burnout for healthcare professionals. Its DAX Copilot program can write patient summaries for doctors as they talk -– provided the patient has given consent. 

“I have a draft within 15 seconds and that has sifted through all the banter and small talk, it excludes it and takes the clinical information and puts it in a format that I can use,” Atrium senior medical director for primary care Dr. Matt Anderson told WNC Charlotte. 

It’s worth noting that this industry-specific example of how AI can be used to automate time-consuming tasks doesn’t negate Dr. Anderson’s skills, but allows him to demonstrate them and give full attention to the patient.

Remember,  AI can also be used to automate other industry-agnostic tasks beyond note-taking. Forbes offers a step-by-step guide for applying AI to spreadsheets for advanced data analysis using ChatGPT’s data analyst GPT. You can ask the tool to pull out insights that might not be obvious, or trends that you wouldn’t identify on your own.

As with any AI use case, the key is to ask good questions. 

Learning these kinds of AI skills across multiple tools can help you grow into an AI generalist, but those hoping to transition into AI-specific roles will want a specialist who understands the nuances of specific and proprietary tools, too, according to Mike Beckley’s recent piece on FastCompany:

“People want to move fast in AI and candidates need to be able to show that they have a track record of applying the technology to a project. .While reading papers, blogging about AI, and being able to talk about what’s in the news shows curiosity and passion and desire, it won’t stack up to another candidate’s ability to execute. Ultimately, be ready to define and defend how you’ve used AI.” 

This should serve as your latest reminder to start experimenting with new use cases.. Focus on time and money saved, deliverables met, and how AI helps you get there. You got this. 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what matters appeared first on PR Daily.

New Year’s resolutions are something of a paradox. While the intent is to put a name to a commitment as a promise to ourselves to honor it, so many of us stop at the naming part.

Holding a want or need inside is how the best ideas gestate, but voicing it aloud can keep you accountable — so long as you realize the work doesn’t stop once you’ve expressed it.

To that end, the Ragan editorial team asked members of our network to share their career- and communications-centric New Year’s resolutions with us. We’re grateful to these leaders for their courage in sharing their goals, not only in the seasonal spirit of sharing, but also so that we may learn from their objectives and model our own goals after their example. We also look forward to seeing how these communicators bring their objectives to life (and we’re confident they will).

We hope that you’ll see something to inspire, inform and codify your own commitments, too.

Here are the ones that stuck out most.

Impactful, strategic prioritization

“My number one goal in the new year is to start a ‘Not-To-Do’ list.’ I stole this idea from a friend and love the concept. In 2024, I want to ensure that my team isn’t spending time on things that don’t move the needle. As communications professionals, a million asks are often thrown our way and I plan to be more discerning and intentional with what we devote our time and resources on.

“My second resolution is to slow down and prioritize. This industry is known for being fast-paced – it’s one of the many reasons I love it – however, sometimes I find myself doing too much at once. And if I’m really honest with myself, I’ve made some silly and some not-so-silly mistakes while in a rush. In 2024, I want to slow down and prioritize my priorities.”

~ Johnna Muscente, Head of Communications and PR, The Corcoran Group

“My goal in 2024 is focus, as sometimes I can’t see the forest from the trees. It’s easy to get caught up in a swirling cyclone of urgent requests and never-ending deadlines, managing a flurry of details and pushing ourselves to the edge, working long hours to execute daily tasks and tactics. We all want to be wildly productive and keep checking items off the list, whether it’s a paper planner, a to-do list or organizational project management systems like Asana. No one wants to see an avalanche of looming deadlines, or worse yet, late tasks or complaints from colleagues. However, that often means we don’t take the time to pause and focus on strategy and the big picture. ’Strategy’ and ‘strategic’ are beyond overused words: They’ve become cliches, business jargon and SNL jokes — like that “strategery” sketch.

“I often feel I don’t have time to think about the big picture and our long-term goals. However, more than being productive, in 2024, I want to do be impactful. I want to focus on what is most essential first, letting everything else fall into place. Leaders often talk about their north star, future casting, or working backward from the success they want to see at the end of the year. Communications leaders can struggle with this because we’re responsible for internal and external communications and our own goals, plus often serve as in-house agency support for the entire office, which creates that endless laundry list of tasks outside our control that feel impossible to prioritize.

“In 2024, I plan to host a team retreat to review and prioritize our strategic plan goals, and accelerate the completion of our integrated organizational communications and marketing plan. Yes, I still want to see each tree — each project — and be productive, but more importantly, I want to keep the big-picture forest in front of me and our team at all times so we can make this the year that we exponentially increase our impact, increasing awareness and relevance for our organization and working to provide opportunities so that every person in every community can live their healthiest life.” 

~ Amanda Ponzar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, CHC: Creating Healthier Communities

Collaborating more to refine the internal/external mix

“[I’d like to] identify more collaboration opportunities to educate on and create ‘mixternal’ communications. I know this concept really began taking off in 2021 due to the pandemic/remote work; however, with the return to office, I am seeing less intentional communication/collaboration between some teams because they are again beginning to meet in person — whereas before, they were forced to think through ‘how do we communicate this’ on the even playing field of a remote working environment.

“I believe my role in internal comms will need to (as internal comms always does) help bridge the gap. So, in metaphor form, not only teach people to fish, but show them where the fish are biting.”

~ Chelsey Louzeiro, Senior Communications Manager, Heifer International

Making email comms simpler and more accessible

“In 2023, I decided to pay close attention to what our team has to say about the emails we send around. Everything from the amount of emails in a day, the content of the emails, the design of the emails, and what days they are sent. I get it — nobody’s glued to their screens waiting for the next company update. So, for my 2024 resolution, I want to make the stuff I share more accessible and interesting for everyone.

“I know people check their emails at all kinds of random times (especially knowing we are a national organization with global offices), so my plan for 2024 is to keep things simple. I’ll throw in quick summaries or ‘TLDRs’ to ensure the important stuff isn’t lost in the shuffle. AI programs like Grammarly offer great tools to summarize large amounts of content into one paragraph or bullet points. Making it easy for my associates to digest information will be key in sharing company news.”

~ Aray Rivera, Sr. Manager, Internal Communications, J. Crew

Championing underrecognized social media managers

“My goal for 2024 is to be a champion for social media professionals, it’s time to elevate the position and give it its due recognition. I want to continue to grow and support young social media managers and help them advance their careers. Why? Because social media managers understand critical things about a brand’s audience, their preferences, and their needs. I believe missteps and even mistakes are made because the recommendations of social media managers are not taken seriously, or they’re not even brought in during the strategy phase of important communication decisions. Also, I’m rooting for all social media managers, and I want them to get to where I am in my career.”

~ Jenny Li Fowler, Director of Social Media Strategy at MIT, Author of ‘Organic Social Media’

Refining the art of saying ‘yes’ less

“Communications pros tend to be pleasers. I like to tell my team that everything that comes to us is somebody’s top priority. So we say, ‘yes.’ A lot.

“My New Year’s resolution is to say ‘no’ more often. But if you listen carefully, you’ll seldom hear me actually utter that word. Instead, I’ll say it without saying it. I’ll indicate that I’ll ‘circle back with the team and check on capacity.’ I’ll ‘put it on the backlog’ and see if we can get to it down the road. I might even suggest that this be a story best told ‘in your own words’ and encourage them to submit a piece of user-generated content.

“So maybe my resolution isn’t to say ‘no’ more often, it’s actually to say ‘yes’ less frequently. Either way, it seems like the right answer, and it gives me optimism that my team and I can have an increasingly positive impact on the organization in 2024, while maintain some semblance of balance in our lives.”

~ Kevin Berchou, Head of Internal Communications, M&T Bank

May these resolutions from fellow communications leaders inspire you to be pragmatic yet ambitious as you set your own commitments for 2024!

The post Your New Year’s communications resolutions appeared first on PR Daily.

In fact, the Lominger talent management system, first developed by Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo in 1991 based on their work at the Center for Creative Leadership, lists “dealing with ambiguity” as one of the 67 competencies that aspiring leaders can focus on developing through performance reviews, upskilling and more.

Lominger, which was acquired by management consulting firm Korn/Ferry in 2006, is still implemented in organizations across industries and regions. And for communicators looking to prepare the next generation of comms leaders, “dealing with ambiguity” should continue to be prioritized.

Lominger says that those adept at navigating ambiguity are able to effectively cope with change, shift gears with comfort and decide to act even when they don’t have the whole picture.  Employees with this skill demonstrate their leadership by not getting frustrated when a situation is up in the air andby being able to think strategically when communicating about risk even if an issue or crisis hasn’t resolved itself completely.

Does that sound like anyone you know?

Ambiguity is an opportunity to refocus on the big picture

Suffice it to say, any communicator working in a risk-averse industry must sit with ambiguity, and even those in low-drama industries will have to flex the muscle when communicating around a reorg or M&A. Several members of the Ragan community have shared stories about long slogs of uncertainty when their organization is about to be acquired and employees are feeling uneasy. Will there be layoffs? Will there be new leaders to report to?

Waiting is indeed the hardest part. But being direct and simple with your message helps. When in doubt, turn to your organization’s mission.

“It’s always important to keep the organization’s mission front and center,” one comms leader told Ragan anonymously. “Crisis and ambiguity both are major distractions, but whenever you can return to the mission (or simply keep the mission at the center of the messaging), that can be a stabilizing reminder for people who otherwise might be starting to spin off their axis.”

Communicating with simplicity and sensitivity

There have been many revelations gleaned from Ragan’s continued partnership with Microsoft during our annual Internal Communications Conference at the tech giant’s Seattle-based headquarters this past October, but one that keeps coming back springs from the company’s research into the neuroscience of employee sentiment.

Microsoft found that employees were less stressed out about bad news than they were over communications that are uncertain, and that simple language functions with a degree of intellectual sensitivity in uncertain times. “People are less stressed when they hear about bad news than when things are uncertain,” said Microsoft Chief Learning Officer Joe Wittinghill. “That old adage that what leaders do is get bad news out fast? We can show you why that’s actually true now.”

“Communicators are often asked to make bricks without straw, to communicate in the absence of key messages and in ambiguous, undefined, unresolved situations,” another comms leader said. “Simple, clear language is key. Even if the message is just to say, ‘we’ll send another update when we have more information.’

Touchpoints build trust

In such uncertain instances, another comms leader said that their firm takes an unusually candid approach. Honoring transparency as a core value means the CEO and leadership have become very comfortable saying some version of “We are aware of the situation and this is what we know, but we don’t have answers yet.”

“The key for us is a commitment to coming back with information and answers when we do have them,” the comms leader explained, offering one example during a recent M&A when the staff at the company that the leader’s firm was acquiring had many quesitons about everything from benefits and policies to possible layoffs.

“Rather than avoiding the question or making promises, our leadership clearly said ‘We don’t know yet, but we’ll give you a place to ask your questions publicly, and we will commit to answering them all (regardless of how uncomfortable),’” they continued. The firm went even further by opening a forum for employees to ask things anonymously. “Over the course of several months, the leaders diligently answered every single question as soon as they knew the way forward on the issue under inquiry.”

Employees of the acquired firm overwhelmingly said that was that this approach helped build trust. “Because they didn’t feel like leaders were ducking or avoiding,” the comms leader said. “They answered when they knew.”

Consistency is key

Aspiring communications leaders who are able to make the case for such an honest, consistent policy will not only demonstrate their ability to deal with ambiguity, but bolster their employee advocacy strategy in the process.

On the flipside, having answers and withholding them because they seem too negative will only backfire. People will eventually find out, breaking the trust you’ve previously created. Remember, employees would rather have bad news than no news at all.

It’s worth considering how the same strategy of transparency amid uncertain times can be demonstrated when things aren’t as serious or heady.

“Another key has been to apply this method in things that don’t have momentous weight, such as the date for a holiday party or the charity we are going to support this year, so the behavior is always on display – not just when things are big and scary,” the comms leader said.

By messaging stakeholders with simple, clear language at a consistent cadence, communicators are able to cultivate trust that’s ready to deploy in uncertain times. That’s what being a true leader is all about.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post Why dealing with ambiguity is a critical comms skill appeared first on PR Daily.

We are still deep in the questions phase of AI. Communicators are grappling with deep, existential questions about how we should use AI, how we should respond to unethical AI use and how we can be positive stewards for these powerful technologies.

So far, the answers are elusive. But the only way we’ll get there is by thinking deeply, reading widely and staying up-to-date.

Let’s catch you up on the biggest AI news from the last few weeks and how that applies to communications. 

Tools and uses

Amazon has entered the AI assistant race – with a few notable twists over competitors like Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard.

The new Amazon Q is described as a “work companion” by Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, in an interview with the New York Times. It can handle tasks like “summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets and answering questions about company policy,” according to the Times.

The tool  was specifically built to handle corporate concerns around privacy and data security raised by other generative AI products. As the Times describes it:

Amazon Q, for example, can have the same security permissions that business customers have already set up for their users. At a company where an employee in marketing may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q can emulate that by not providing that employee with such financial data when asked.

Q can also plug into existing corporate tools like Gmail and Slack. It undercuts the $30 price point of both Google and Microsoft, clocking in at $20 per user per month. 

But technology is already moving far beyond simple virtual assistants. An AI-generated “singer” posted “her” first song on X. It’s … something.

Hello world! I’m Anna Indiana and I’m an AI singer-songwriter. Here’s my first song, Betrayed by this Town. Everything from the key, tempo, chord progression, melody notes, rhythm, lyrics, and my image and singing, is auto-generated using AI. I hope you like it pic.twitter.com/0Cf42iyxHI

— Anna Indiana (@AnnaIndianaAI) November 24, 2023

The appearance of “Anna Indiana” (please leave both Hannah Montana and the fine state of Indiana out of this) and the entirety of the song were composed via AI. The entire effect is uncanny valley to the extreme. But it’s not hard to peer into a not-too-distant future where this technology is refined and companies start creating their own bespoke AI influencers.

Imagine it: a custom spokesperson designed in a lab to appeal to your precise target audience, able to create their own material. This spokesperson will never go rogue and spout conspiracy theories or ask for huge posting fees. But they also won’t be, well, human. They’ll necessarily lack authenticity. Will that matter? 

The entertainment industry is grappling with similar issues as “synthetic performers” – or AI-generated actors – become a more concrete reality in film and television. While the new SAG-AFTRA contract puts some guardrails around the use of these performers, there are still so many questions, as Wired reports. What about AI-generated beings who have the vibes of Denzel Washington but aren’t precisely like him? Or if you train an AI model to mimic Jim Carrey’s physical humor, does that infringe on Carrey?

So many questions. Only time will have the answers. 

Risks

Yet another media outlet has seemingly passed off AI-generated content as if it were written by humans. Futurism found that authors of some articles on Sports Illustrated’s website had no social footprint and that their photographs were created with AI. The articles they “wrote” also contain head-scratching lines no human would write, such as opining on how volleyball “ can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

Sports Illustrator’s publisher denies that the articles were created with AI, instead insisting an outside vendor wrote the pieces and used dummy profiles to “protect author privacy.” If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Gannett went through an almost identical scandal with the exact same company a month ago, including the same excuses and denials.

These examples underscore the importance of communicating with transparency about AI – and the need to carefully ensure vendors are living up to the same standards as your own organization. The results can be disastrous, especially in industries where the need for trust is high – like, say, media.

But the risks of AI in the hands of bad actors extendextends far beyond weird reviews for sporting equipment. Deepfakes are proliferating, spreading an intense amount of information about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in ways designed to tug on heartstrings and stoke anger.

The AP reports:

In many cases, the fakes seem designed to evoke a strong emotional reaction by including the bodies of babies, children or families. In the bloody first days of the war, supporters of both Israel and Hamas alleged the other side had victimized children and babies; deepfake images of wailing infants offered photographic ‘evidence’ that was quickly held up as proof.

It all serves to further polarize opinion on an issue that’s already deeply polarized: People find the deepfakes that confirm their own already-held beliefs and become even more entrenched. In addition to the risks to people on the ground in the region, it makes communicators’ jobs more difficult as we work to discern truth and fiction and communicate with internal and external audiences whose feelings only grow stronger and stronger to one extreme. 

Generative AI is also changing the game in cyber security.  Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year, there has been an exponential increase in phishing emails. Scammers are able to use generative AI to quickly churn out sophisticated emails that can fool even savvy users, according to CNBC. Be on guard and work with IT to update internal training to handle these new threats.

Legal and regulation

The regulatory landscape for AI is being written in real-time, notes Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton in a piece that urges publishers to take a beat before diving head-first into using language learning models (LLM) to produce automated content. 

Benton’s argument focuses specifically on the most recent ruling in comedian and author Sara Silverman’s suit against Meta over its inclusion of copyrighted sections from her book, “The Bedwetter,” into its LLMs. Despite Meta’s LLM acquiring the text through a pirated copy, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in the tech giant’s favor and gave Silverman a window to resubmit.

Benton writes:

Chhabria is just one judge, of course, whose rulings will be subject to appeal. And this will hardly be the last lawsuit to arise from AI. But it lines up with another recent ruling, by federal district judge William Orrick, which also rejected the idea of a broad-based liability based on using copyrighted material in training data, saying a more direct copy is required.

If that is the legal bar — an AI must produce outputs identical or near-identical to existing copyrighted work to be infringing — news companies have a very hard road ahead of them.

Cases like this also beg the question, how much more time and how many more resources will be exhausted before some standard precedents are set by federal regulation? 

While Meta may count the initial ruling as a victory, other big tech players continue to express the need for oversight. In the spirit of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg visiting the Senate in September to voice support of federal regulation, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that individual company guardrails around AI won’t be enough. 

Schmidt told Axios that he believes the best regulatory solution would involve the formation of a global body, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that would “feed accurate information to policymakers” so that they understand the urgency and can take action.

Global collaborations are already in the works. This past weekend, The U.S. joined Britain and over a dozen other countries to unveil what one senior U.S. official called “the first detailed international agreement on how to keep artificial intelligence safe from rogue actors,” reports Reuters. 

It’s worth noting that, while this 20-page document pushes companies to design secure AI systems, there is nothing binding about it. In that respect, it rings similar to the White House’s executive order responsible AI use last month – good advice with no tangible enforcement or application mechanism. 

But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The best case for effective federal legislation regulating AI will emerge when a pattern of state-level efforts to regulate AI take flight. 

In the latest example, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer plans to sign legislation aimed to curb irresponsible or malicious AI use.

ABC News reports:

So far, states including California, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have passed laws regulating deepfakes in political advertising. Similar legislation has been introduced in Illinois, New Jersey and New York, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen.

Under Michigan’s legislation, any person, committee or other entity that distributes an advertisement for a candidate would be required to clearly state if it uses generative AI. The disclosure would need to be in the same font size as the majority of the text in print ads, and would need to appear “for at least four seconds in letters that are as large as the majority of any text” in television ads, according to a legislative analysis from the state House Fiscal Agency.

One aspect of this anticipated legislation that has the potential to set federal precedents is its focus on federal and state-level campaign ads created using AI, which will be required to be labeled as such. 

You can take this “start local” approach to heart by getting the comms function involved in the internal creation of AI rules and guidelines at your organization early. Staying abreast of legal rulings, state and federal legislation and global developments will not only empower comms to earn its authority as being early adopters of the tech, but also strengthen your relationships with those who are fearful or hesitant over AI’s potential risks. 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments! You can also get much more information about using AI in your writing during our upcoming Writing & Content Strategy Virtual Conference! 

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

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It’s been one year since generative AI exploded onto the scene. And lest you thought this would be a flash in the pan, the technology is growing at a dizzying speed, gaining new uses and changing how we live and work. 

Over just the past week, Elon Musk rolled out an interesting new chatbot he calls “Grok,” which is meant to be a more irreverent cousin to ChatGPT. How funny or “rebellious” it actually is, we leave to you. 

Meanwhile, IBM is putting serious cash into finding the next big thing in AI, dedicating $500 million to investing in AI startups.

And OpenAI is continuing to up its game and roll out new features, including the ability to create your own custom AI bots. Search Engine Journal reported that the newly-released ChatGPT Turbo can now process 300 pages of text at one time and also offers insight into the world up to April 2023. It also gives you the ability to create your own custom chatbot. This could be a great middle path for organizations too small to develop their own bot in-house but who want the robustness of a custom tool.

No, generative AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Let’s find out what’s new this week that will impact your own communications practice. 

The latest in AI regulation

We’ve reported in the past on how most support federal AI regulation, including some of the tech industry’s biggest leaders. 

But that doesn’t mean all litigation is moving in support of human authorship. To the contrary,  California federal judge Vince Chhabria ruled last week that he would dismiss part of a copyright lawsuit filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors against Meta, focused on its Llama AI folding their work into its learning models, due to a lack of understanding how Llama misused their intellectual property. 

“I understand your core theory,” Chhabria told attorneys for the authors according to Reuters. “Your remaining theories of liability I don’t understand even a little bit.”

While the judge will give Silverman and others the option to resubmit their claim, the ruling highlights the knowledge gap and lack of transparency between how these tools scrape information and how those outside of the field understand its workings.

In Washington, however, regulatory discussions around AI are moving at a quicker pace. This week, the FTC submitted a comment to the U.S. Copyright Office that emphasizes the FTC’s concerns about how AI will affect competition and consumer protection.  

“The manner in which companies are developing and releasing generative AI tools and other AI products . . . raises concerns about potential harm to consumers, workers, and small businesses,” the comment reads. 

“The FTC has been exploring the risks associated with AI use, including violations of consumers’ privacy, automation of discrimination and bias, and turbocharging of deceptive practices, imposters schemes and other types of scams.”

Deepfakes, malware and racial bias 

Here’s the part where we show you all the scary ways the Bad Guys are using AI. Or even that the Good Guys are using it and producing unintended consequences.

Scammers are using the promise of AI technology to spread malware, in a new twist on a gambit that’s as old as the internet itself. Reuters reported that scammers are offering downloads of Google’s Bard AI. The problem, of course, is that Bard isn’t a download – it’s available right on the web. Those unlucky enough to download the file will find their social media accounts stolen and repurposed by spammers. Google is suing, but the defendants are currently anonymous, calling into question just how much the suit will help.

Meanwhile, AI experts are still incredibly worried about the use of AI to create undetectable fake content, ranging from videos to images. By one estimate, 90% of all content on the internet could be AI-generated by 2025, Axios reported. 

That’s just over one year away.  

Now, content being generated by AI isn’t inherently a bad thing. The problem is when you can’t tell what’s real from what’s artificial. The technology is already able to mimic reality with such precision that even leading AI minds can’t tell the difference. We can certainly expect AI-led manipulation to play a major role in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

However, there are some tools that can help prevent the creation of deepfakes in the first place, particularly where audio is concerned. NPR reported on a tool that creates a digital distortion over human voice recordings. People can still hear the clips, but it renders AI systems unable to create a good copy. While the tech is new, it does generate a ray of hope in a bleak landscape for the truth.

Finally, former President Barack Obama is raising questions about the misuse of AI against people of color, particularly in policing. At a recent AI summit, Obama expressed optimism about new regulations implemented by his former running mate Joe Biden, but also noted the “big risks” as AI algorithms can often perpetuate racism, ableism, sexism and other issues inherent in their human creators. It’s an important note for communicators to keep in mind: AI models are as flawed as the people who create them. We must act with empathy and a diversity mindset to reduce harm.

The “doing” phase

We aren’t here just to give you bad news. There are also a lot of genuinely positive uses for AI that smart people are dreaming up that could change the way we all live and work. Do they all carry potential downsides? Naturally. But they can also spark creativity and free up humans for higher-level work.

For instance, the New York Times reports that soon generative AI will be able to do more than just recommend an itinerary for your next trip – it could be able to book airfare and make reservations for you. This “doing” phase of AI could change everything, making AI genuine personal assistants rather than just a smart Google search. 

“If OpenAI is right, we may be transitioning to a world in which A.I.s are less our creative partners than silicon-based extensions of us — artificial satellite brains that can move throughout the world, gathering information and taking actions on our behalf,” the Times’ Kevin Roose wrote.

A recent test recently pushed this idea to its current practical limit as AI fully negotiated a contract with another AI – no humans involved, save for the signature at the end. CNBC reported that the AI worked through issues surrounding a standard NDA. Here’s how it worked:

Luminance’s software starts by highlighting contentious clauses in red. Those clauses are then changed to something more suitable, and the AI keeps a log of changes made throughout the course of its progress on the side. The AI takes into account companies’ preferences on how they normally negotiate contracts.

For example, the NDA suggests a six-year term for the contract. But that’s against Luminance’s policy. The AI acknowledges this, then automatically redrafts it to insert a three-year term for the agreement instead.

That’s a lot of trust to place in AI, obviously. But it shows what could be possible in just a short time. Imagine having AI review your social media posts for legal compliance rather than waiting for counsel to get back to you.

In a move that’s both neat and potentially terrifying for communicators, AI is being used to analyze minute changes in an executive’s demeanor while speaking that could indicate nerves or larger problems than they’re letting on. A tool called Speech Craft Analytics can analyze audio recordings for changes in pitch, volume, use of filler words and other clues humans may miss, the Financial Times reported. 

So you may soon be adding voice coaching to your media relations training, lest you be caught by a too-smart AI.

AI and the workforce

Meanwhile, it’s also worth considering how the deal that the SAG-AFTRA actor’s union struck to end its 118-day-long strike over, among other things, clear protections against AI replacing actors and extras. 

Going even further than the WGA protections that ended the writer’s strike in September, SAG’s agreement holds implications for workforces outside of the entertainment sector, too.

Wired’s Alex Winter reports:

The SAG deal is similar to the DGA and WGA deals in that it demands protections for any instance where machine-learning tools are used to manipulate or exploit their work. All three unions have claimed their AI agreements are “historic” and “protective,” but whether one agrees with that or not, these deals function as important guideposts. AI doesn’t just posit a threat to writers and actors—it has ramifications for workers in all fields, creative or otherwise.

The absence of enforceable laws that would shackle Big Tech doesn’t make these deals a toothless compromise—far from it. There is great value in a labor force firmly demanding its terms be codified in a contract. The studios can find loopholes around some of that language if they choose, as they have in the past, but they will then be in breach of their agreed contract and will face publicly shaming lawsuits by influential and beloved artists and the potential of another lengthy and costly strike.

In the absence of federal regulations, who should oversee the composition of internal guidelines and practices that uphold expectations between businesses and their workforces? 

That may be answered, as the role of the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) is on the rise. According to new research from Foundry, 11% of midsize to large organizations already have a CAIO, while another 21% of organizations are actively searching for the right candidate.

At businesses that don’t have a dedicated CAIO on the horizon, meanwhile, communicators should embrace the opportunity to become early adopters not only of the tools, but of the internal guidelines and governance practices that will protect jobs and corporate reputation.

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

The post AI for communicators: What’s new and what’s next appeared first on PR Daily.

Internal communications leaders often share the same operational grievance — because they work so well across functions, even when they are such good collaborators and relationship builders, it  feels as though endless requests keep coming.  

It’s easy enough to maintain an editorial calendar or use project management software, but creating and protecting an artful, strategic cadence becomes harder when things come down from on high, from across the room, or from partners that comms has no visibility around. 

How can communicators safeguard their workflows and refine the art of saying “not right now, here’s why?” We spoke to two Ragan Communications Week board members to learn how they realign expectations to stay strategically focused while remaining helpful cross-functional partners. 

Aligning goals from the get-go 

When asked to create something seemingly ad hoc, the best place to start is by asking questions about goals.  

“Sometimes, because we’re all so busy, we don’t ask ‘why’,” said FREYR Battery SVP of U.S. Communications Amy Jaick.  

“You know, ‘Tell me more about what you’re trying to achieve’. Because sometimes what people are asking for is not the only solution. And sometimes I’m able to find efficiencies or synergies in that way.” 

Jaick supposes there may be a time when someone comes to you and asks you to write a press release, which you could engage by prompting a deeper conversation about who they are trying to reach.  

“’Is it broadly appealing, are you trying to reach the masses or is this better as a very targeted social post?’” Jaick might ask. “’Can we make this an internal announcement, take some of the language from that and social post very targeted, you know, or can we make this an internal announcement and then we take some of the language from that and share it in a different way?’” 

“Part of the solution is understanding what people are trying to achieve from the get-go, not just what they‘re asking,” added Jaick. “And once you have an understanding of that, do you need to create this?” 

Moving away from single-use comms 

Jaick’s question as to whether something must be created net new each time or whether it’s better to work with something you already have, then reshape or reform it, is a matter of each time and energy investment. 

Danielle Brigida, sr. communications director at The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), believes that we shouldn’t be creating very many one-off pieces of communication as a rule.  

“You just don’t have time to do something that you can only use for one purpose,” Brigida said. “Single-use content is like single-use plastic. You should avoid it whenever possible. “ 

“We’re rewarded as communicators for outputs,” she continued. “Especially the cheap outputs, the things you don’t have to work as hard on but get you a lot of exciting feedback. It’s about balancing that with strategy… like skiing downhill and taking the paths that already exist versus the ones you have to carve out on your own.” 

So how do you make sure the proactive paths you carve out on your own aren’t one-and-done?  

Brigida recently reframed a request for a video promoting an upcoming conference from being strictly focused on the conference to instead covering the bigger question of why, in this case, tigers are important to biodiversity and how they benefit people, too. WWF will be able to continue using this content well after the conference, but it can still be helpful with conference promotion.  At the end of the day, creating helpful content that serves multiple purposes is one way to benefit many areas of work. It’s an extra step to think through your communications this way, but it’s well worth it.  

“When we’re resource-constrained, we’ve got to figure out how to repurpose as much as possible,” she added with a wink and a nod to a classic sustainability slogan. “I think ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ is a good comms strategy.” 

Embracing a tiered structure of support  

When one is overwhelmed, it’s easy to get defensive and say ‘no’ to new requests. While this tendency is natural, learning to say, ‘yes, but’ is the more diplomatic approach. 

Jaick understands how communicators can tier the systems of support that they provide. Using a premise wherein another function needs social media support and your team is overwhelmed, Jaick saw three scenarios.  

In one, her team helps them directly craft those posts and they work on it together.  

The second is when her team gives them quality examples for similar situations, “where we’ve seen this happen enough times that I can kind of give you a structure that you can take and make your own,” explained Jaick. “It’s sort of prefabbed—it’s not custom, but there’s enough there that you can take from it and create your own.” 

In a third scenario, you simply provide a couple of examples of teams who have done it well. 

“It’s ‘yes, and’ or ‘yes, but’ where you’re not saying no entirely,” Jaick said. “’Yes, I can help you and this might be a good way’ or ‘Yes, I can help you but we’re not able to devote all this time to a campaign — here’s a framework.’”  

How are you repurposing content and level-setting around asks by tying them back to goals? Let us know, and don’t forget to join us in Austin for Ragan’s Communications Week and the Future of Communications Conference. 

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for AI.

New tools are being rolled out to make life easier for us all. It could be so great, we could get down to a 3.5 day workweek!

But this week also brings us serious concerns about AI’s role in creating deepfakes, perpetrating colorism and more.

Read on.

Deepfakes, impersonation and skin hue take center stage

Some of the dystopian fears that AI represents are beginning to come to fruition. 

Impersonation and deepfakes are emerging as a critical problem.

Multiple actors have found that their likenesses are being used to endorse products without their consent. From beloved actor Tom Hanks (“Beware!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”) to “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King (“I’ve never heard of this product or used it! Please don’t be fooled by these AI videos.”), celebrities are speaking out with alarm, the New York Times reported.

The reputational risks for these entertainers is real, but it’s not hard to imagine more dire deepfakes causing major harm: the CEO of an airline “announcing” a crash, for instance, or a president “threatening” nuclear war. The technology is here, it’s real and it’s frightening.

But there is criticism of AI being used to mimic entertainers extending even beyond deepfakes. Zelda Williams, daughter of late comedian Robin Williams, strongly condemned attempts by studios and others to recreate her father’s voice using AI. “These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for,” she wrote on Instagram. She strongly voiced her support for the actors currently on strike, where one of the issues at stake is the use of AI in entertainment. 

Outside of entertainment, it’s becoming clear how easy it is for bad actors to evade mandatory watermarks placed on AI-generated images, according to University of Maryland Computer Science Professor Soheil Feizi. Feizi’s research shows not only how easy it is to remove or “wash out” watermarks, but also how simple it is to add fake watermarks to non-AI images to generate false positives.

Many tech giants have looked to watermarks as a way to distinguish AI images from the real, but it appears that strategy won’t work, sending everyone back to the drawing board. 

“We don’t have any reliable watermarking at this point,” Feizi said. “We broke all of them.”

The people who make AI work are also struggling to ensure it is inclusive for people of all races. While it’s more common to test AI for bias in skin tone, The Verge reports that skin hue is often overlooked. In other words, researchers are currently controlling for the lightness and darkness of skin, but not redness and yellowness. 

“East Asians, South Asians, Hispanics, Middle Eastern individuals, and others who might not neatly fit along the light-to-dark spectrum” can be underrepresented because of this, Sony researchers wrote. 

But it isn’t all gloom and doom in the world of AI. There are positive elements coming, too. 

Recent data and insights on AI and the future of work

Q4 arrives with mere weeks leading up to Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference, and AI news around the future of work is plentiful.

A recent study from Morgan Stanley forecasts that over 40% of the labor force will be impacted by AI in the next three years.

CNBC reports:

Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force — or affect about 44% of labor — over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. 

Nowak identifies falling “input costs” for companies getting on board, which may inform why job posts mentioning AI have more than doubled over the past two years, according to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report. 

Big investments in automation abound, with Visa earmarking $100 million to invest in generative AI companies “that will impact the future of commerce and payments,” reports TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, IBM announced a partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation to explore AI’s potential application for better skills-based hiring practices. 

The Chamber created a test case for job seekers by examining if AI models can help workers identify and recognize their skills, then present them in the form of digital credentials.

“If proven possible, then future use cases of AI models could be explored, like matching users to potential employment and education opportunities based on their skill profiles,” explains IBM. 

“They discovered that AI models could in fact take someone’s past experiences—in different data formats—and convert them into digital credentials that could then be validated by the job seeker and shared with potential employers.”

What’s the endgame of all this? In a recent Bloomberg interview, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon offered some utopian ideas for how AI will positively impact the workplace, eventually leading to a 3.5-day workweek. Sounds nice, right? 

Dinon’s comments aren’t that far removed from other CEOs who believe AI will streamline repetitive tasks and help parse data more efficiently, but this optimism must be tempered with the reality that leaders–and their willingness to approve training and upskilling for their workforces on operationalizing AI applications now– will largely inform which roles are eliminated and what new ones are created. 

Bing’s ChatGPT levels up in a big way

One of the major drawbacks to using ChatGPT only “knew” things that happened up to September 2021. But now, it’s able to search the entire internet up to the current day to inform its responses, Yahoo Finance reported. The feature is currently available to paid users on ChatGPT 4 and people using ChatGPT’s integration with Bing, now known as Browse with Bing. 

Bing also added another helpful feature: You can now use OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 from directly within its ChatGPT integration, making it easier to create generative AI images without the need to open another browser tab. 

All of these changes continue to position Bing as a major player in the generative AI space (even if it’s getting most of its smarts from OpenAI) and open new possibilities for AI use. 

WGA protections may set a precedent for federal regulations

Last week saw the end of the Writer’s Guild of America’s (WGA) 148-day strike. Amid the terms of the agreement were substantial regulations that protect against AI encroaching on the writing process.

The WGA regulations say:

• AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights. 
• A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services. 
• The Company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material.
• The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.

While these regulations aren’t federal, they do set an interesting precedent. Over the past few weeks, this column has explored how The District Court of D.C. ruled that AI images are not subject to copyright, while the U.S. Copyright Office held an open public comment period to determine how it will advise on federal AI regulations going forward. 

In a recent visit to Washington, even Musk and Zuck told the Senate that they want federal regulation on AI. The risks and liability of leaving this work to be self-regulated are simply too great.

Those risks are underscored by recent court cases, including a recent filing wherein authors including Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI for using their words in its learning models. Reuters reported on the filing, which alleges that “OpenAI violated U.S. law by copying their works to train an artificial intelligence system that will ‘replace the very writings it copied.’”

Add to that a chorus of state and local governments that are either taking AI for a test run or imposing a temporary ban, and the likelihood of federal regulation seems all the more assured.

Keep watching this column for future updates as they evolve, or join us for our AI Certificate Course for Communicators and Marketers. Don’t wait, classes start next week! 

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Justin Joffe is the editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Before joining Ragan, Joffe worked as a freelance journalist and communications writer specializing in the arts and culture, media and technology, PR and ad tech beats. His writing has appeared in several publications including Vulture, Newsweek, Vice, Relix, Flaunt, and many more.

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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With Communications Week just over two months away, Ragan convened our esteemed Comms Week advisory board to learn how they are future-proofing their strategies and responding to the most hot-button issues affecting the communications function.

We first asked how they teach their teams to work with artificial intelligence (AI). Here’s what we learned.

Comms leaders are helping others get more comfortable with generative AI 

We cover AI  extensively at Ragan, sharing tips on everything from writing effective prompts to navigating legal concerns and crafting guidelines. We offered a certificate course on using AI for comms, and partnered with The Conference Board on a proprietary study to look at communicators’ top concerns, which include misinformation and a lack of accuracy, legal uncertainties, data security and privacy.

The Comms Week board echoed these concerns before sharing how they are getting out in front of them.

Peppercomm founder and CEO Steve Cody said that his agency sets aside a half hour every Thursday to brainstorm for either an existing client or a prospective client, making sure whoever leads the brainstorm is using generative AI to supplement their research. “We want them to be comfortable with it,” Cody said.” And we also want our people to try and figure out what was created by the individual versus the generative AI. So it’s kind of like a little bit of a ‘Jeopardy!’ game mixed into a brainstorm.”

AI as the enabler, not the enemy

Tiffany Guarnaccia, CEO of Kite Hill PR and the founder of Communications Week, pulled back a bit to look at the bigger picture. “I think AI should be an enabler and not an enemy when it comes to how we’re working and how we’re thinking about business,” she said, acknowledging that her perspective comes from working in a tech PR agency.

“We launched a tech task force that’s looking at AI as just one piece of the evolving comms tech stack that we’re continuing to evaluate,” she continued. “We’re also following  the PRC guidelines. I think they did a good job of laying out things from an ethical perspective.”

Ultimately, Guarnaccia acknowledged that we are all led by the decisions or applications in different platforms as they apply to our daily workflows.

“The other challenge is how it continues to evolve,” she said, “and in every challenge, there’s an opportunity for the team. It’s also coming back to showing the value of strategy, because AI is replacing some things that are maybe more tactical when we look at our work. It spotlights the opportunity to be more strategic and a strategic partner to our clients.”

Calming employee concerns about AI

Of course, being a strategic partner to clients and colleagues a lot includes addressing their concerns. That’s why Cody’s team leans on the Chief Technology Officer Tejas Totade at parent company Ruder Finn, who gives Peppercomm employees a monthly tutorial on the latest, greatest thinking around what’s new, what to be concerned about and what not to worry about.

“It’s an ongoing, continuous learning part of the professional development program,” says Cody.

The futurist perspectives of a CTO who is comfortable communicating make Totade a perfect leader to address concerns, as he starts and ends each of his half-hour presentations with a focus on what it means to employees.

Totade breaks it down by sharing, “This is what you need to know, this is what it means to me, and this is what I think it means to you,” Cody explained. “This is what you should be worried about, and this is something that you should not worry about. This is what’s going to make you even more effective.”

Upskilling the next generation of communicators on AI

Columbia Business School Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Amy Jaick summarized the breadth of conversations happening around AI at Columbia, where faculty members conduct research and use the tools in the classroom, students are thinking about how to integrate it into assignments when appropriate, and other employees are using it to streamline their productivity.

Witnessing all of this, Jaick shared the stakeholder consensus that we shouldn’t be worried about people being replaced by generative AI — but we should worry about being replaced by the people who use it.

“It’s not quite there yet where it will take our jobs,” she said. “But you should be worried about the person who knows how to use it to do their job better because they will be quicker and more efficient, more creative, whatever the more is.”

This underscored Jaick’s big point—that understanding and being trained on AI should be of primary importance. Beyond writing prompts, training should also include reaching a consensus on what constitutes proper attribution of AI-generated work.

“When does AI go from being a tool to being a substitute for your own ideas, or a heavily defined input,” she asked. “Where is the line between being additive or being a compliment? When is it a substitute?”

Stay tuned for more coverage of this Communications Week roundtable and register now for the signature Comms Week Event, Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference, before it sells out!

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For the past 10 years, the United States Senate has recognized July 30^th as National Whistleblower Day, which the National Whistleblower Center frames as an American tradition that   “commemorates the bold vision of our Founding Fathers and their uncompromising support for whistleblowers.”

“This year marks the 245th anniversary of America’s first whistleblower law, passed unanimously on July 30th, 1778 during the height of the American Revolution,” the Center explains. “The law was passed after ten whistleblowers reported wrongdoing and abuses committed by a superior officer in the Continental Navy.”

While a vital part of American democracy, whistleblowers can have an outsized influence on the communications function. While leaking information can make our jobs more difficult, it also often exposes larger failings in the organization that allow for lapses in ethics or values.

This is no secret to Sherron Watkins, the former vice president of corporate development at Enron, who became a whistleblower when she exposed the company’s fraudulent accounting practices. Nor is it a new concept to Erika Cheung, the Theranos whistleblower who felt compelled to speak up about the former biotech company’s deceptive medical practices, Cheung now serves as executive director at Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit focused on fostering ethical questions, culture and systems in business.

Both felt compelled by a moral obligation, a sense that their organizations were doing a disservice to shareholders, customers and employees alike.

Ragan editors caught up with them after their keynote sessions at the Ragan Communications Leadership Council spring retreat in Colorado Springs, when both gave advice about how communicators can become guardians of sound morals and ethics in business.

“Sharpen your professional fluency in asking the difficult questions,” said Watkins. She emphasized the importance of routinely asking questions like, “Is there anything else I should know in this? Is there anything else I’m missing in order to make the right decision here?” Ask to look at source documents.

“Those are important to make sure someone isn’t trying to keep you from understanding some wrongdoing,” she advised.

Watkins added that it’s crucial that comms understand how cash flow works on financial statements—understanding the difference between cash flow from operations, cash flow from financing activities and equity transactions.

Watkins offers more communications wisdom here:

Cheung said that entrepreneurs and communications leaders can make a huge mistake if they don’t think they will eventually come up against a moral or ethical dilemma in business.

“You’re going be faced with pressure, you’re going to be faced with opportunities that test your values,” she said. “It’s easy to rationalize when those pressures are there how you can maybe do the wrong thing, even if it’s a small, little grievance.” These small moral and ethical lapses, she continued, can easily snowball into a massive disaster.

Cheung also warned against the danger of carelessly creating hero stories around leaders when the stories ignore evidence pointing to ethical disconnects. This was certainly the case with Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder whose fraudulent reports on the success of her proprietary medical technology drove Cheung to go public with what she knew. In that instance, the media truly wanted to believe that Holmes was changing the world for better. That urge dissuaded most from looking closer and discovering that the product was faulty.

To this end, communicators can take a page from a journalist’s raison d’être and be truth-tellers and do enough investigation to see if the claims they are presented with are real. “Are the details of what someone is telling me in this sort-of curated storyline… actually the reality of what’s going on there?” asks Cheung, explaining that the hype around Holmes’ promises and how much money she raised buried the tough questions.

“There’s some responsibility there,” she said. “The need for diligence, the need to always ask good questions just to vet and double check is the core premise of what we’re saying actually true?”

Cheung goes deeper here:

These conversations took place during the spring retreat of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council. For more information about this winter’s retreat and joining the council, get in touch here! 

The post Advice for communicators from Theranos, Enron whistleblowers appeared first on PR Daily.

It’s hard to believe, but generative AI only exploded into the public consciousness with the broad release of ChatGPT last November. Since then, it’s upended so many aspects of life — and threatens to change much more. It’s a central issue in the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, is being scrutinized by governments around the world and is even drawing parallels to the invention of the nuclear bomb.

Here’s what’s happened just in the last two weeks in the world of AI — brace yourself, it’s a lot.

Top AI news

Seven of the biggest names in AI — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — voluntarily agreed last week to certain regulations in response to White House pressure. As the New York Times reported:

As part of the safeguards, the companies agreed to security testing, in part by independent experts; research on bias and privacy concerns; information sharing about risks with governments and other organizations; development of tools to fight societal challenges like climate change; and transparency measures to identify A.I.-generated material.

This is certainly only the first step of AI regulations in the United States; Senate hearings continue even as this article is published, with some industry leaders even advocating for regulation. Additionally, the White House has indicated its intention to limit foreign nations’ (read: China) ability to obtain certain AI technologies, though details on what that executive order would look like have not yet been released, according to the Times.

In other big news, Meta has released its Llama 2 (get it, LLM, llama?) in an “open source” form.

…sort of.

Ars Technica reports that, while the tool can be used in some commercial applications or by hobbyists (or bad actors, for that matter), it has restrictions that make it not truly open source.

Whether Meta’s move will increase transparency or lead to an increase in disinformation, we’ll have to wait and see.

The answer is probably both, though.

Striking actors and writers rally around shared AI concerns

While the Writers Guild of America (WGA) began striking in May, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG AFTRA) joined them a few weeks ago. Both unions have similar demands, asking for streaming residuals, what they consider to be a living wage and, notably, addressing what SAG-AFTRA calls “the existential threat AI poses to their careers.”

Indeed, these shared concerns over the use of AI in film and TV programs are a sticking point for both unions. While the WGA requests that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) bans the use of AI writing and rewriting outright, SAG-AFTRA is not seeking a prohibition on AI so much as a request “that companies consult with [the union] and get approval before casting a synthetic performer in place of an actor,” according to Reuters:

While the two sides have negotiated over issues ranging from using images and performances as training data for AI systems to digitally altering performances in the editing room, actors are worried entirely AI-generated actors, or “metahumans,” will steal their roles.

“If it wasn’t a big deal to plan on utilizing AI to replace actors, it would be a no-brainer to put in the contract and let us sleep with some peace of mind,” Carly Turro, an actress who has appeared in television series like “Homeland,” said on a picket line this week. “The fact that they won’t do that is terrifying when you think about the future of art and entertainment as a career.”

Concerns over the rate at which the industry is embracing AI are not unfounded, with actor Charisma Carpenter raising a red flag after she received an invitation to join Swiss-based Largo.ai’s “100 Actors Program,” which claims it “will automatically suggest matching characters to producers/directors” and “you won’t be charged any commission for the roles you secure,” reports Dateline.

Amid all of this, Netflix posted an AI project manager job with an annual salary range of $300,000-900,000.

While the work of writers and actors may seem a far cry from our work as communicators, the concerns expressed by fellow storytellers over AI’s influence on their work and livelihoods marks a significant milestone and is considered to be the first time that a creative union has pushed back against the influence of creative automation, according to Time.

Moreover, the ongoing strike is drastically impacting the overhead of PR firms in the industry, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Yet another reminder of the large financial consequences that can arise when your employees aren’t part of discussions around expanded automation use.

AI’s Oppenheimer moment

Christopher Nolan, director of the hit film “Oppenheimer,” which tells the story of the creation of the nuclear bomb, said that AI engineers are looking to his film to help them work through the moral quandaries of the technologies they’re building.

As Nolan said in a recent interview with Chuck Todd:

When I talk to the leading researchers in the field of AI right now, for example, they literally refer to this as their Oppenheimer moment. They’re looking to his story to say “OK, what are the responsibilities for scientists developing new technologies that may have unintended consequences?”

Nolan added that he hoped that people working on artificial intelligence “leave the film with some unsettling questions, some troubling issues.”

Reassuring.

AI and business

Microsoft and Alphabet reported quarterly results this week, highlighting AI investments and how those investments impact growth.

Microsoft said its investments in Open AI and the integration of generative AI into its products like Bing led to 21% gains in year-over-year operating income for its intelligent cloud business segment, Forbes reported, contributing to its highest quarterly sales ever.

Alphabet also had an incredible quarter, reporting $8 billion in quarterly revenue with its own cloud segment.   

AI and the news industry

AI threatens to accelerate the decline of news media in a variety of ways. The risk is so real, many of the country’s most prominent outlets are already readying lawsuits against artificial intelligence purveyors, most notably News Corp and the New York Times.

As Semafor reports:

Many publishers have begun to experiment with AI tools aimed at making writing more efficient. But executives also worry about threats to everything from their revenue to the very nature of online authority.

The most immediate threat they see is a possible shift at Google from sending traffic to web pages to simply answering users’ questions with a chatbot. That nightmare scenario, for Levin, would turn a Food & Wine review into a simple text recommendation of a bottle of Malbec, without attribution.

Publishers are looking to learn from the mistakes of the social media era, where they were paid relatively small sums for the content that powered many of these platforms. Now,  they want billions. To get it, they might head to the courtroom where the legal system would be forced to wrestle with thorny and complex copyright issues.

But AI is seeking to change newsgathering in other ways, too. Google is shopping a tool called Genesis to the country’s biggest newspapers, the New York Times reported. Genesis could serve as a “personal assistant for journalists,” the Times said.

What exactly that means depends on who you talk to. The Times said that some who heard the sales pitch “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.” But Google said Genesis would not replace journalists, but rather check style and offer headline suggestions.

Notably, this would replace the role of some journalists, including editors, copy editors and audience engagement professionals who perform these tasks.

AI and HR

Job applicants are finding a workaround for AI résumé screeners that look for keywords to advance them in the interview process.  In a practice known as “white fonting,” savvy applicants will copy keywords relevant to the role from the job description into their CV and change the font color to white, reports The Washington Post. While the document will look normal to HR, the applicant tracking system will catch the text and deem the candidate a fit based on the inclusion of these skills.

This hack arrives at a time when many candidates are looking for work and the applicant pool is high. For HR and comms alike, it’s among the latest reminders that AI may streamline aspects of your workflow, but it can’t replace human judgement and context.

Meanwhile, HR pros looking to fill AI roles are largely concentrated in just four states—California, New York, Texas and Massachusetts, reports Axios:

Generative AI may produce “winner-takes-most” economic outcomes, per the authors of the Brookings report, unless the government moves to foster a more broadly distributed AI sector.

Report authors Mark Muro, Julian Jacobs and Sifan Liu suggest that a “widely distributed” expansion of public sector AI research and access to computing to spread AI benefits away from “superstar cities.”

This adds a new lens to talent wars that HR pros will want to watch, as the markets that invest heavily in this technology will likely see operational efficiencies and economic shifts sooner than the ones that don’t.

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter, LinkedIn or Threads.

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With advances in AI occurring every week, keeping up with the news can be a dizzying, daunting task. That’s why we’ve launched this joint Ragan and PR Daily column, rounding up the biggest developments in AI that communicators need to know about, with a focus on how it will impact your work and your business.

This edition looks at significant developments in international AI regulation, an onslaught of legal issues for content creators, how HR teams are using AI, and what comms can learn from the recent wave of tech layoffs attributed to the technology.

Legal issues surrounding AI heat up

The legal issues surrounding generative AI are coming fast. Today, the FTC announced that it will investigate OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, over the tool’s inaccuracies and potential harms.  According to the New York Times:

In a 20-page letter sent to the San Francisco company this week, the agency said it was also looking into OpenAI’s security practices. The F.T.C. asked the company dozens of questions in its letter, including how the start-up trains its A.I. models and treats personal data. A group of authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, are suing both Meta and Open AI over their alleged use of the authors’ works to train large language model systems.

In another example, a group of authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, are suing both Meta and Open AI over their alleged use of the authors’ works to train large language model systems.

“Indeed, when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works –something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” the lawsuit says, according to reporting from Deadline.

This lawsuit will be one to watch as courts will try to determine if creators can bar their content from being fed into AI models. It also serves as a warning to those using these tools: you may inadvertently be using copyrighted material, and liable for misuse.

Several services offering AI imagery are trying to get ahead of that concern by offering protection against lawsuits brought over copyright claims against those who use their AI tools.

Shutterstock is offering human review for copyright concerns, including an expedited option, with full indemnity for clients. Adobe Firefly has taken a different tact, claiming all images the AI is trained on are either public use or are owned by Adobe. It, too, offers full indemnity for users.

All of these issues speak to one of the biggest challenges facing AI: the unsettled questions of ownership and copyright. Expect this space to continue to evolve — and fast.

How international governments are handling AI regulation

Governments are scrambling to adapt as AI technology advances at breakneck speed. Unsurprisingly, different nations are handling the situation in disparate ways.

The EU, known for its strict privacy regulations, is leaning toward a touch set of rules that some business leaders say threatens industry in the bloc.

“In our assessment, the draft legislation would jeopardize Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty without effectively tackling the challenges we are and will be facing,” the 160 leaders wrote in a letter, CNN reported. Signers include leaders from Airbus, Renault and Carrefour, among others.

Specifically, the signatories say the regulations could hold the EU back against the U.S. While some Congressional hearings on AI regulations have been held, there are no proposals near passage yet. Meanwhile, EU regulations are being negotiated with member states now, according to CNN. They could include a ban on the use of facial recognition technology and Chinese-style “social scoring systems), enact mandatory disclosure policies for AI-generated content and more.

Meanwhile, fellow technological juggernaut Japan seems more inclined toward a less restrictive, American-style approach to AI than European stringency, according to Reuters.

Journalism’s rocky relationship with AI continues

Newsrooms keep trying to use AI, pledging full fact-checking of the content before publication. And newsrooms keep failing in that promise.

The latest misstep was created by Gizmodo, which published an error-filled timeline of the “Star Wars” cinematic universe, the Washington Post reported. Human staff at Gizmodo were given just 10 minutes warning before the AI story was published, and they quickly found basic factual errors with the story and criticized their employer for a lack of transparency around AI’s role in its creation.

“If these AI [chatbots] can’t even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other, I don’t think you can trust it to [report] any kind of accurate information,” Gizmodo deputy editor James Whitbrook told the Washington Post.

This unforced error is as much a failure of internal communications as external. By not bringing in staff earlier and giving them a chance to ask questions, raise concerns and perform basic fact-checking, Gizmodo owner G/O Media gained powerful critics who were unafraid to speak to the press about their missteps.

But there is, of course, also the question of using AI in journalism at all. The International Center for Journalism has compiled a list of questions to ask before using AI to keep audience trust.

Tech companies cite AI as the reason behind massive layoffs

In a move that sci-fi novelists Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick saw coming, AI is already replacing jobs in the very industry that created it. Data tracked by Layoffs.fyi shows that more than 212,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2023, already surpassing the 164,709 recorded in 2022.

June saw the trend continue as ed tech company Chegg disclosed in a regulatory filing last month that it was cutting 4% of its workforce “to better position the Company to execute against its AI strategy and to create long-term, sustainable value or its students and investors.”

But the tech industry layoff wave began this past May, when 4,000 people lost work to the technology, including 500 Dropbox employees who were informed via a memo from CEO Drew Houston.

“In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another,” wrote Houston. “And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we’ll need even more.”

Houston’s words underscore the importance of including AI training in the learning, development and upskilling opportunities offered at your organizations. To echo an aphorism that has been shared at many a Ragan event over the past year: “AI won’t replace your job, but someone using AI will.”

These words should read less a foreboding warning and more as a call to action. Partner with your HR colleagues to determine how this training can be provided to all relevant employees through specific use cases, personalized in collaboration with the relevant managers. And understand that HR has its own relationship with AI to consider, too. More on that below.

AI can replace the ‘human’ in human resources, but not without risk

HR teams face their own set of legal pitfalls to avoid. New York City’s Automated Employment Decision Tool (AEDT) law, considered the first in the country aimed at reducing bias in AI-driven recruitment efforts, will now be enforced, reports VentureBeat.

“Under the AEDT law, it will be unlawful for an employer or employment agency to use artificial intelligence and algorithm-based technologies to evaluate NYC job candidates and employees — unless it conducts an independent bias audit before using the AI employment tools,” the outlet writes. “The bottom line: New York City employers will be the ones taking on compliance obligations around these AI tools, rather than the software vendors who create them.”

Of course, that isn’t stopping HR teams from leaning into AI more heavily. In late June, Oracle announced it would add generative AI features to its HR software to help draft job descriptions and employee performance goals, reports Reuters.

What trends and news are you tracking in the AI space? What would you like to see covered in our biweekly AI roundups, which are 100% written by humans? Let us know in the comments!

Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter, LinkedIn or Threads.

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A week before Pride Month began, communicators were once again reminded of the role we play in fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging at work.

Last week, Target received several threats for its in-store displays of Pride merchandise, including some directed at employees directly. Fearing for the safety and wellbeing of its workers, Target pulled much of the merch, while CEO Brian Cornell defended the choice in a letter to employees that also reiterated his, and the company’s, support for the LGBTQ+ community.

While some applaud Target and Cornell for centering their decision around employee wellbeing, some experts warn against the precedent that canceling Pride campaigns sets. But for communicators, this incident also highlights the tightrope many organizations must walk between espousing values of inclusion and belonging that are important to some stakeholders without fear of riling up others. And in the context of Pride Month, such instances are a reminder that pointing back to the work you’ve done throughout the year remains the best way to demonstrate consistent support—the kind of support that withstands even the most vocal aggressors.

To Target’s credit, the company has made its always-on support for LGBTQ+ employees a core value of its employer brand. A company page offers an overview of its decade-plus engaging with Pride, its Pride+ Business Council ERG, information about the LGBTQ+ organizations and suppliers it partners with and more. These are all valid and important pieces of its larger inclusion story—and worth shouting from the rooftops when detractors accuse you of being inauthentic or opportunistic.

This begs the question— what are other organizations doing to support the LGBTQ+ employee experience? How are leaders modeling this behavior in authentic, non-gestural and non-performative ways? How is HR ensuring its benefits are expansive of all lived experiences? And how can an organization view its Pride communications as only the beginning of a long journey?

Treat Pride Month as an activation for larger initiatives.

While supporting LGBTQ+ employees should be ongoing, Pride Month offers a timely news peg for centering your work around a core theme or focus. This year, a key focus of PayPal’s Pride efforts is centered around how seemingly small acts contribute to culture in large ways.

“This year for Pride Month, we are rallying around the theme ‘Visibly Proud,; which focuses on promoting small, but meaningful acts of visible allyship,” said Josh Criscoe, senior director of corporate affairs and communications at PayPal. This includes a resource guide for leaders on the importance of normalizing pronoun use and a push for all leaders to add their pronouns to their intranet profile, Slack, Teams and email signature, along with Pride-themed virtual meeting backgrounds available for all employees to use throughout the year and more.

“These seemingly minor actions send visible signals of allyship, promote inclusion and add further a culture of belonging,” Criscoe said.

The work continues through PayPal’s eight employee resource groups (ERGs) that are also empowered to support talent recruitment and retention, supporting business initiatives while fostering a culture of belonging at the same time. PayPal also launched an inaugural ERG summit and ERG Academy to further promote collaboration, share best practices and build subject matter expertise.

Encourage leadership to model actionable allyship.

It’s often said that true change starts at the top, and demonstrating allyship is no different.

At Pfizer, EVP and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Susman regularly ranks as one of the most well-respected corporate leaders who identify as LGBTQ+, and her internal influence, along with her frequent external thought leadership, reinforce the work being done by members of its OPEN colleague resource group elsewhere in the organization. This sends a signal to all stakeholders that Pfizer walks the talk.

“Our leaders recognize the paramount significance of fostering equity, ensuring that every colleague thrives in an environment dedicated to their professional and personal triumphs,” Jennifer Kokell, director of digital communications at Pfizer, told Ragan. “By guaranteeing equal access to growth opportunities, mentorship, and advanced learning resources for every colleague, we empower them to unleash their full potential and fulfill our purpose — breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.”

For PayPal’s leaders, showing what actionable allyship looks like includes a mentorship program that pairs Pride members with senior executives. In one meeting, a leader shared a personal story about coming out to his parents and spoke vulnerably about his struggles with being accepted. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is personally championing the company’s core value of inclusion, too, interviewing Kelley Robinson, the new president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) to talk about key issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community in 2023 with a focus on how PayPal can get involved.

Offer inclusive benefits and volunteer opportunities.

Working with HR to socialize how your benefits are inclusive and expansive of all families and genders also sends a signal to your workforce that those who control the spending will put their dollars where their corporate value statement is. Farmers Insurance exemplifies this by offering 10 weeks of 100% paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender identity, including those who become a parent through surrogacy or non-family adoption.

The company’s commitments to this work have also helped earn Farmers a 100% score from the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index for Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality. “We strive to foster an engaging and dynamic work environment that supports employees bringing their whole selves to work,” the company told Comparably. “Celebrating the LGBTQ community helps Farmers foster a culture of inclusion and connect colleagues.”

Remember that benefits manifest in many different ways. Keeping with its 2023 pride theme of “Visibly Proud,” PayPal is also offering volunteering opportunities through its partnership with nonprofit Out in Tech, connecting technologists with LGBTQ+ organizations that can benefit from their skill sets.

PayPal, Pfizer and Farmers are only a few of the organizations doing this work, but their efforts illustrate how Pride Month is a timely opportunity to refresh and realign your DE&I work with larger organizational strategies and ESG goals. Of course, doing this will take a lot longer than one month — and that’s the point.

“Pride for Pfizer is not timed to a month,” said Kokell. “Making sure everyone is seen, heard and cared for It is culturally engrained in everything we do every day through our core values – courage, excellence, equity, and joy.  When colleagues bring their authentic selves to work, creativity thrives, passion leads and collaboration blossoms.”

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Each year, Ragan’s Communications Benchmark Report offers industry-specific insights into what areas and practices are driving the biggest wins for communicators leaders — and posing the biggest challenges.

Of the comms pros who took the survey this year, over half (54%) said that they manage their organization’s social media strategy. Though this number is slightly down from the 57% who said they manage social media in last year’s report, it is still a reminder that social media practitioners are not just marketers. On the contrary, 70% of respondents said that social media channels remain their most effective medium for external communications.

Nearly a third (29%) said they would be offering their comms team more training around social media over the next year, too. With organizations struggling to decide whether the big platforms such as TikTok, Meta, and Twitter are still healthy comms platforms in the wake of numerous scandals, we expect this number to grow.

Meanwhile, 65% of respondents said they will also train their comms team more on measurement and analysis and 77% said they gauge the effectiveness of comms efforts around social media engagement such as retweets and shares, while 65% still gauge follower count as a telling metric. It will be interesting to see whether more training on social media increases the specificity of inputs and outcomes measured across social media strategies in the coming year.

We will discuss these results during Ragan’s Social Media Conference at Walt Disney World, March 15-17. Those attending this event will enjoy three days of social media training, networking and celebrations at Disney’s Swan and Dolphin Resort with sessions led by communications and marketing leaders at Google, Pfizer, NASA, Domino’s, Sony and more.

Register now to learn and celebrate with Ragan at Disney during the 10^th anniversary of our Social Media Conference!

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Held each year in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) describes itself as “the most influential tech event in the world.” With an estimated 100,000 attending last week’s event, it may be the largest, too.

While tech brands treat the annual trade show as an opportunity to show off their latest innovative gadgets and products, this year’s show also saw an increased focus on technology that will shape the future of work — and how that technology impacts employees.

Here are the announcements that stood out.

New tech marketed to remote and hybrid workers

 Some of the announcements for new PC peripherals directly seized on the remote and hybrid work trend, emphasizing monitors with higher resolutions for an optimal remote work environment and laptops marketed to freelancers. Among these products, HP went further by emphasizing the collaboration capabilities of its new HP Dragonfly G4, HP EliteBook 1040 G10, and HP Elite x360 1040 G10, which include multi-camera support so workers can simultaneously show themselves alongside a display or whiteboard, documents and more.

HP also introduced the Poly Voyager Free 60 Series line of wireless earbuds, which it claims was designed with hybrid workers in mind. Beyond adaptive noise canceling and background noise blocking, HP also says that the buds can pair with the Poly Lens mobile app to let IT managers remotely manage employee devices.

Of course, with each innovation in technology comes a potential for the tech to be misused or abused, and these buds are no exception. “Remotely managing devices” traditionally refers to taking complete control of the device, but it’s unclear from HP’s initial release if this means that the buds can allow IT to record what employees hear and say through their wireless earbuds, or take them over entirelly.

In an era where employee surveillance is more common than ever, it’s on communicators to consider the ethical implications of this tech should your organization consider adopting it. And in some instances, that will require asking additional questions of manufacturers before agreeing to use hardware at an enterprise level.

Those earbuds were not the most dystopian piece of workforce tech at CES, however. Instead, that superlative goes to Acer’s bike desk:

Acer says that the gadget, which uses kinetic energy generated by pedaling to power the user’s devices, encourages a healthy lifestyle while doubling a sustainable energy solution. The desk shifts into a working mode and a sports mode depending on whether the user is working out, while a companion app also tracks user data and progress.

Looking at the eKinekt bike desk, it’s hard to not imagine thousands of these machines in a row in some nondescript, dimly lit factory, illuminated only by the glow of a laptop screen and accompanied by the eerily synchronous sounds of fervent pedaling. In any case, the businesses consider that consider buying these for certain workers will be making a bold statement about their commitment to work culture. While promoting health and wellness is wonderful, this tech walks a fine line by tethering biometrics to work productivity and negating employees with disabilities.

Meeting, onboarding and training in the metaverse

When Facebook rebranded as Meta and began to tease its forays into the metaverse, communicators wondered whether this new dimension for virtual engagement would have enterprise-level applications beyond marketing. The potential for internal meetings in the metaverse seemed fuzzy at best difficult to scale and still a ways off.

This year, the vision of a collaborative office in the metaverse seems closer to a reality, with Dell edging forward as a leader in metaverse prototypes. At this year’s show, Dell showed off Concept Nix, which impressed CNET reporter Dan Ackerman.

CNET reports:

At a pre-CES preview, I was able to participate in a faux meeting by creating a 3D avatar for others to see, and also by sitting in front of an autostereoscopic display (allowing you to see in 3D without special glasses) that gave me a 3D view of a project. After that, I donned a VR headset to feel like I (or my avatar) was actually in that shared space and writing on a whiteboard with my VR controller. And after that, I was able to use a slate-style tablet to interact with the real-world version of that same whiteboard, but without wearing a headset.

During the show, Accenture also explained how it used the metaverse to onboard 150,000 new team members virtually during the pandemic. New hires were given an XR headset and introduced to the metaverse within a virtual “One Accenture Park.” Beyond there, they used the metaverse for team collaboration, meetings, town halls and more. Accenture also increased its learning and development opportunities, along with its commitment to accessibility, though this program.

At #ces2023, #Accenture's perspectives on #Metaverse, including how they aim to use it for #training and #education, #accessibility, and the onboarding of 180k new #employees.#ces23 #ai #ar #vr #innovation #tech #technews #immersive #immersiveexperience #immersivetechnology pic.twitter.com/xmH2b9wCFn

— AkshayaNFT (@akshayaNFT) January 6, 2023

Digital fluency can improve the employee experience

New products and software aside, several CES panelists explained how the tech was just a means to an end for helping employees regain some time and quality of life:

“The first phase was location independence, the next frontier is time independence.” @darrenmurph @gitlab #futureofwork #allremote #CES2023

— Savvy at #CES2023 (@SavIsSavvy) January 5, 2023

Christie Smith, talent & organization/ human potential lead at Accenture, and Meta Director of Future of Work Dr. Kelly Monahan, went further, explaining how digital fluency can close the gap between what workers expect from a job and what employers are offering:

CES 2023 went beyond products to demonstrate how the future of work will not be shaped by technology alone, but also how that technology is implemented as part of the employee experience. To that end, staying curious, as early adopters of new and emerging tech while remaining skeptical around any potential for abuse or misuse will ensure that your judgment as a communicator remains vital to your IT, HR marketing departments and more.

Justin Joffe is the editor-in-chief of Ragan Communications. Outside of Ragan he is also a media and culture writer, an avid music nerd, cinephile, and musician whose recorded output ranges from ambient and experimental to folk and rock’n’roll.  Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

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Communicators are at a crossroads each time a hot topic of public debate, from social justice issues to ESG and beyond, enters the news cycle. Is it appropriate for your organization to comment? Is taking a stand the right thing to do?

Ragan Communications partnered with research consultancy HarrisX in the fall of 2022 to understand how and when CEOs and communications leaders feel it’s appropriate for organizations to take a stand on issues of public interest, and the factors that influence their decisions.

The survey was conducted by HarrisX from Oct. 11-24 within the U.S. among 360 CEOs and high-ranking senior communications.

Asked whether organizations should take a stand on political and social issues, 63% of CEOs said yes and 37% said no. Just  58% of communications leaders agreed brands should speak out.

Those numbers rose when respondents were asked whether organizations have a responsibility to challenge public policies when they threaten employees’ rights — 76% of CEOs said yes and 74% of communications leaders said no.  This drastic increase in support demonstrates how attuned leadership is to the opinions of internal stakeholders—and offers a reminder that organizations can avoid reputational risk by tying larger purpose and values commitments back to a positive employee experience.

Those numbers fell again when each group was asked if standing up for employee rights should happen even if it meant losing revenue, with 61% of CEOs and 66% of comms leaders agreeing.

The fact that fewer CEOs said they support employee rights at the expense of revenue than those who support taking a stand overall is telling. Of course, failing to stand up for employee rights can bring about revenue losses in different ways as employees who experience a disconnect between their personal sense of purpose and the corporate purpose of their employer may very well leave, causing a loss of productivity and talent. It’s on communicators to connect the dots for the rest of the C-suite here.

Download the HarrisX-Ragan Key Findings Report here

The post How CEOs feel about speaking out on issues of public interest appeared first on PR Daily.

The communications function is at an inflection point, as a renewed focus on work-life balance and employee culture have made the C-suite more aware of the work communicators do.

With that in mind, Ragan Communications partnered with research consultancy HarrisX in the fall of 2022 to understand how CEOs and communications leaders view each other’s roles and responsibilities, what they value most and how they envision the future of work.

The survey was conducted by HarrisX from Oct. 11-24 within the U.S. among 360 CEOs and high-ranking senior communications.

Asked whether they would support their organization switching to a four-day workweek, 82% of CEOs said they would support it compared to 74% of comms leaders. While support for a four-day workweek dropped when considering impact on productivity, over half of the CEOs surveyed (58%) still support the idea, compared to 34% of comms leaders. Meanwhile, 64% of CEOs said they still support a four-day workweek even if it meant lower bonuses — demonstrating that they have more concern about worker productivity than whether workers are being rewarded for their work.

Download the HarrisX-Ragan Key Findings Report here.

The post How CEOs feel about a four-day workweek, according to new poll appeared first on PR Daily.

While social media practitioners increasingly encompass a wide range of disciplines and titles — from community managers to paid social experts, analytics leads and more — your organization’s focus will depend on the needs of your audiences.

As strategic communications skills also become increasingly crucial to successful social media strategies, your employees should be one of those audiences on your radar, too. Activating your employees to become your brand ambassadors and influencers by weaving them into your social strategy can assist with employer branding initiatives, educational and reputational support, and much more.

Ragan and PR Daily caught up with Amanda Ponzar, chief communications and strategy officer at CHC: Creating Healthier Communities to ask her a few questions about how she approaches activating employees as influencers. Ponzar will be a speaker at Ragan and PR Daily’s upcoming Social Media Conference, which takes place in person Sept. 21-23 at Disney World in Orlando.

Ponzar’s responses have been lightly edited.

Ragan: Why did you get into communication in the first place? What drove you to it?

Amanda Ponzar: I’ve been writing stories and poetry since I was a little kid, even before I could spell, and I’ve always been into fine art, drama, singing, public speaking, etc. I never “got into” communications, it got into me, or was born into me. I wrote for high school and college papers and was an English major in college and assumed I’d go into teaching or journalism, but colleagues at one of my first jobs redirected me into advertising copywriting. I’ve been working in communications and marketing ever since, for more than 20 years.

What do you think is the most important part of a social media communicator’s role in an organization?

 Social media is the fast and furious (and frequent) public face of an organization. Social media communicators must flex and move faster, swiftly adapting to news — global pandemics, tragedies, social justice, politics and more along with stakeholder posts — versus creating content calendars and sticking with them a year in advance. Compare that to a website that often gets a major overhaul every few years at best.

Social media shines when it’s “social” and personable, engaging with empathy and authenticity in a timely manner, whereas a website can be more corporate and static.

What tips or advice can you share so that organizations can make the most of their social media communications?

Posting regularly is important, along with understanding what channels work best based on the needs of your stakeholders. We’re B2B and relationship-driven so LinkedIn is pivotal for us, whereas TikTok or Instagram might be more important for a brand that engages with consumers or different generations. It may sound trendy and sexy to be on every platform out there, but unless you have a massive team and money to burn, narrowing your target is best.

Engaging your employees as influencers helps expand your reach on social media. And it always comes down to testing and measuring content and doing more of what works, as every company is different. Just because a celebrity does something and it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for your brand.

What do you see as the next thing for social media communications? What should organizations be doing now to stay ahead of the trends?

Visuals and video continue to be big, and authenticity reigns supreme. It’s important to follow the top brands and individual accounts to see what’s working and test it for your own organization. I don’t try to get ahead of trends; rather, I follow those who are doing great work to watch and learn.

At this year’s Ragan and PR Daily’s Social Media Conference, you’re conducting a session the rise of employee influencers. Can you give our readers a preview of what they can expect to learn?

Social media platforms have given individuals influence and the ability to reach your customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. This goes way beyond traditional word-of-mouth marketing, just telling friends and neighbors in your network. Employees can be your most passionate, knowledgeable, authentic ambassadors.

We’ll talk about harnessing employees to raise their voice in support of your organization and teaching them how to be more visible on social media. It’s truly a win-win, creating strong personal brands and executive presence for your employees while raising awareness and credibility for your organization.

Join Amanda and other social media leaders at Ragan and PR Daily’s Social Media Conference, when speakers from TikTok, Intel, Meta and more will share their ideas and success stories. Register today!

The post The Road to Disney: How to engage employees as influencers on social appeared first on PR Daily.

There’s a new phrase traveling around the Internet — “quiet quitting” — which refers to the practice of employees consciously working no harder at their job than they need to.

The phrase has traveled across social media, where one TikTok user defines it as “doing the role you’re paid for and not going over and above. Its (sp) not voluntarily signing up to extra projects and contributing to hustle culture”:

@totalreward “Quiet Quitting” is being defined as doing the role you’re paid for and not going over and above. Its not voluntarily signing up to extra projects and contributing to hustle culture.I think this is obsurd, is it “quitting” or is it setting boundaries?Are we expected to constantly be in an accelerated state?what are you thoughts? #quietquitting ♬ original sound – Total Reward

The poster goes on to challenge the word itself, writing “Is it ‘quitting’ or is it setting boundaries? Are we expected to constantly be in an accelerated state?”

“The most interesting part about it is nothing’s changed,” another poster said in his TikTok video. “I still work just as hard. I still get just as much accomplished. I just don’t stress and internally rip myself to shreds.”

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup’s workplace and well-being research, said workers’ descriptions of “quiet quitting” align with a large group of survey respondents that he classifies as “not engaged”—those who will show up to work and do the minimum required but not much else. More than half of workers surveyed by Gallup who were born after 1989—54%—fall into this category.

One factor Gallup uses to measure engagement is whether people feel their work has purpose. Younger employees report that they don’t feel that way, the data show. These are the people who are more likely to work passively and look out for themselves over their employers, Dr. Harter said.

Once the shock of the phrase subsides and you realize that the phenomenon doesn’t literally refer to resignation, there’s still the matter of disengaged employees to engage with. But before you begin the task of winning back attention spans, it’s worth taking stock of the situation to understand what the phenomenon can teach you about your workforce.

Here are a few things to consider.

1. Is your leadership modeling remote/hybrid work boundaries?

Matt Spielman, career coach and author of the book “Inflection Points: How to Work and Live With Purpose,” told The New York   that people are likely to scale back the scope of their work when they are at their wit’s end or on the precipice of burnout and explained why remote work amplifies these feelings.

“With remote work it is far easier to feel less involved, less part of a team, and it’s easier for managers to break up with employees and vice versa,” he said. “There are fewer boundaries of when work starts and when work stops.”

In the absence of boundaries clearly defined and communicated by management, employees will find ways to set their own — and considerate internal communication is often the first core competency to go. You can mitigate this by sharing guidelines and expectations for answering work email outside of office hours, encouraging leaders to schedule send messages and making a point of reminding all employees that your office is closed on weekends, holidays and other time off.

If the phenomenon seems to have spread across your workforce, partner with HR to consider a more drastic policy change, such as a shortened work week, volunteer days or other perks that can contribute to your company’s culture and ultimately drive more sense of belonging without creating more work for employees.

2. Are your managers practicing active listening?

Spielman goes on to point out that quiet quitting, and the movement around it, are often framed as employees getting revenge on a company for working them too hard. “Quiet quitting seems very passive aggressive,” he told the NYT. “If somebody is burnt out, there should be a candid conversation about that, and it should be both ways. Just saying, ‘I am going to do the absolute minimum because I am entitled to it or I have issues’ — it doesn’t really help anybody.”

Buried in Spielman’s advice is the idea that it’s on the employee themselves to chat about their issues. In practice, it’s their manager who is charged with holding those candid conversations. In order for those conversations to yield any revelations or progress, managers must practice active listening every day through the common touchpoints including employee comms apps, meetings, email and more.

“You surely understand how to actively listen: don’t interrupt, suspend judgment, ask open questions, paraphrase content as an accuracy check, and reflect emotions to convey empathy,” wrote Rick Brandon, Ph.D in a recent Ragan piece. “But are you short-sighted about when and where you should be listening?”

Of course, this doesn’t work if managers are burnt out or quiet quitting themselves. Just as with boundary setting, this behavior should also be modeled and practice by the leaders who managers report to.

3. Is the purpose of your work being communicated effectively?

Maria Kordowicz, an associate professor in organizational behavior at the University of Nottingham, told The Guardian that the rise of quiet quitting goes beyond mere job dissatisfaction to scratch something deeper.

“The search for meaning has become far more apparent,” she said. “There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking ‘What should work mean for me? How can I do a role that’s more aligned to my values?’”

Kordowicz’s words are supported by “Purpose Under Pressure,” a recent study by Carol Cone, CEO of Carol Cone ON PURPOSE. In the study, 84% said they will only work at purpose-driven companies or brands. For context, 84% also said they feel more empowered than in the past to use their work as a force for good. Eighty-six percent also believe that it’s more important than ever for their work to have meaning.

“It’s what they stand for with their meaning, what they stand for with their bottom line, how do they treat me as an employee?” Cone told Ragan. “Do they listen to me? Do they engage me? Do they allow me to bring my whole self to my work, so if I really love to volunteer I can do that within my company?”

The post 3 things comms pros can do about ‘quiet quitting’ appeared first on PR Daily.

Most people don’t know there are actually five seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall and pumpkin spice.

To celebrate the latter, Goldfish has partnered with Dunkin’ to release a new limited edition snack, Pumpkin Spice Grahams. The fish-shaped snack includes notes of pumpkin, donut glaze and warm spices and hits shelves Sept. 1. To promote the launch, Goldfish and Dunkin’ are giving fans an early access opportunity to buy the snacks. Starting at noon today, a limited quantity of Pumpkin Spice Grahams will be available through TikTok.

@goldfishsmiles tomorrow @dunkin #GoldfishRunsOnDunkin ♬ Beat Automotivo Tan Tan Tan Viral – WZ Beat

The goldfishsmiles account posted about the partnership two days and has started using the hashtag #GoldfishRunsOnDunkin. Although some promotional food collaborations are a hard sell, Pumpkin Spice Grahams don’t seem that far-out.  

Here are today’s other top stories:

Following botched pandemic response, CDC announces major reorganization

Big changes are coming to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Wednesday, CDC director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky announced a sweeping reorganization, after admitting the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic fell short. “To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” she said. “My goal is a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication and timeliness.” 

Walensky’s plans to shake up the CDC come amid ongoing criticism of the agency’s response to COVID-19. For years, the agency has been criticized for being too academic, focusing on the collection and analysis of data but not acting quickly against new health threats. The overhaul is the first step in restoring public trust. Dr. Walensky plans to remake the culture to help the agency move faster when responding to health crises. She also wants to streamline the website and, in general, make it easier for the public to understand health guidance. CDC officials say they hope to have the changes finalized and approved by the Department of Health and Human Services, and underway, by early 2023. 

Why this matters: Experts have said the CDC has long undervalued the importance of communicating directly to the public. COVID-19 exposed the current CDC structure’s inability to take in information and share it at the speed it needed to. Long story short, a breakdown in communication is what led to the shake-up. Better late than never.

MEASURED THOUGHTS

In the battle between “House of the Dragon” and “The Rings of Power,” the real winners are fantasy fans. Data from Morning Consult found that there is broad interest for both series. Two in five adults said they’re interested in watching “The Rings of Power,” while 34% said they’re interested in watching “House of the Dragon.” Self-identified fantasy fans are also interested in watching both shows. 59% said they’d watch Amazon Prime’s “Rings,” while 49% said they’d watch HBO’s “Dragon.” 

(Image via)

While the data suggests that audiences are slightly more interested in watching “The Rings of Power,” there is plenty of room for both series to succeed. That’s good news for both Amazon Prime and HBO, as well as other fantasy franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Social media platforms launch election integrity features ahead of US midterms

With the U.S. midterms coming up, Twitter, Meta and TikTok are taking steps to limit the spread of election misinformation. Last week, Twitter announced it would enforce its Civic Integrity Policy, which covers the most common types of harmful misleading information, including:

“ … claims about how to participate in a civic process like how to vote, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election and misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election — including false information about the outcome of the election.”

Twitter plans to bring back tweet labels and prebunks as well, and is launching new elections info hubs in Explore. Meta also plans to bring back some of its 2020 tactics. The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, will remove posts that call for violence or mislead people on where and how to vote. Meta also plans to work with outside fact-checkers, including five Spanish-language organizations, to review posts and label them if they’re misleading. 

Unlike Meta, TikTok doesn’t allow political advertisements. To limit election misinformation, the video-sharing app plans to double-down on its ban of paid political content. Organic posts referencing politics or elections will remain on the app, as long as they follow community guidelines. Any post that violates the guidelines will be removed. TikTok has also been working with fact-checkers to identify keywords and codewords for the election that should trigger scrutiny. And like Twitter, they plan to launch an elections center that will provide information about polling places, ballots and candidates.

Why this matters: The combination of initiatives from Twitter, Meta and TikTok should help keep users informed. People tend to get their news from social media, so identifying and removing misinformation about the U.S. midterms ensures it won’t aggregate somewhere else. 

The post The CDC announces a comms-focused restructure and social media platforms prepare for midterms appeared first on PR Daily.

The 2022 CSR Awards highlighted the best teams, communicators and campaigns across industries, honoring winners whose CSR & ESG efforts advocated for causes instrumental to their organization’s purpose, spark brand activism, provide disaster and pandemic relief, promote environmental stewardship, and much more.

Ragan Communications and PR Daily hosted the awards luncheon July 14 at New York City’s storied Yale Club, in the heart of Manhattan, where attendees were eager to network and dine together.

The honorees in this awards program underscore the critical role communicators play in helping organizations create meaningful change,” says Diane Schwartz, CEO of Ragan. “While there’s more work to be done around social responsibility and purpose-driven initiatives, just take a look at these award winners and you’ll be heartened by the progress.”

The ceremony also featured a conversation between Carol Cone, CEO and Founder of Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, and Kathleen Dunlop, Global Brand VP of Vaseline. The pair discussed how Vaseline leaned into its purpose when launching a program centered around engaging Black women on the topic of skincare and beauty — and foster a sense of healing and belonging in the process.

“I think one of the most important things is to do the work first, we call it the ‘brand do’ at Unilever, before you talk about it, ‘the brand say,’” said Dunlop.

Ragan Communications and PR Daily congratulate this stellar group of CSR champions.

2022 CSR Awards winners

CSR/ESG Professional of the Year

Fred Ferguson: Vista Outdoor

Curtis Sparrer: Bospar

Denine Torr: Dollar General Corporation

Sheldon Yellen: BELFOR USA Group, Inc.

CSR/ESG Team of the Year

Ameresco: Ameresco’s ESG Ambassadors

Curaleaf: Rooted in Good

Vista Outdoor: Vista Outdoor Comms

Brand Activism

3M: Shattering Stereotypes with “Not the Science Type”

Aflac: The #AflacSickleCellSense Campaign Confronts Health Care Inequities

Mars Food: Introducing Ben’s Original and A New Purpose

Medela: Supporting NICU Families

Pinterest: Pinterest Havens: Invest in rest

UPS: Proudly Unstoppable

Cause Advocacy Campaign

3M: Shattering Stereotypes with “Not the Science Type”

Aflac: The #AflacSickleCellSense Campaign Confronts Health Care Inequities

BODEN Agency: Juntos Crecemos (Together We Grow) Campaign

Call of Duty Endowment: #CODEMedicalHeroes

Priority Health: Priority Health for Good on the Road

The National Football League “NFL”: The Trevor Project’s Partnership with the National Football League “NFL”

United Way of the National Capital Area: Project Community Connect

University of Maryland, Baltimore: Get The Vaccine Baltimore

Community Affairs

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee: Free and Fun for All: BlueCross Healthy Places

Mars Food: Introducing Ben’s Original and A New Purpose

PRLab: PRoBono 2021

Corporate-Community or Nonprofit Partnership

Cricket Wireless: 12 Days of Cricket

Discovery Education: STEM Careers Coalition

DonorsChoose: Racial Justice and Representation in Classrooms Campaign

GoDaddy: Empower by GoDaddy

John Hancock: MLK Scholars Program

Philip Morris International (PMI): United to Safeguard America from Illegal Trade (USA-IT)

Salesforce.org: Salesforce.org’s Power of Us Program and The UC Davis Food Pantry

The National Football League “NFL”: The Trevor Project’s Partnership with the National Football League “NFL”

The Trevor Project: The Trevor Project’s Partnership with YouTube

United Way of the National Capital Area: UWNCA Choose Health Life Campaign

Covid-19 Communications

3M: 3M’s COVID-19 Response

Maximus Corporate Communications: Stop the Spread

Covid-19 Program

3M: 3M’s COVID-19 Response

Cambridge Health Alliance: Vaccine Outreach Campaign

Criteo: Diversity Equity Inclusion and Sustainability Team at Criteo

CSR Agency of the Year

Yulu Public Relations: Yulu Public Relations

CSR Campaign of the Year

Aflac: The #AflacSickleCellSense Campaign Confronts Health Care Inequities

BELFOR USA Group, Inc.: Celebrating Our Humble Heroes

Bospar: Bospar Messes With Texas

Disney Parks, Experiences and Products: Disney Magic Makers

IFS: IFS Change for good

CSR or ESG Event (Virtual or In Person)

ESPN: ESPN’s 15th Annual V Week

Wolters Kluwer Enablon: Enablon Cares

Disaster Prevention or Pandemic Relief

Infineon Technologies: Infineon Technologies

INFUSEmedia: INFUSEmedia Free 100 & Business Reopening Program

The PepsiCo Foundation: Black Restaurant Accelerator

Education or Scholarship Program

BODEN Agency: McDonald’s HACER® National Scholarship | Puertas Doradas

Discovery Education and Jackson Charitable Foundation: ChaChing Money Smart Kids!

Discovery Education and USC Shoah Foundation: Teaching with Testimony

Megaworld Foundation, Inc.: Connect2Connect: Nurturing Megaworld Scholars through Digital Transformation in the New Normal

TIAA Bank: Be the Change Scholarship

T-Mobile: Magenta Scholars

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated: Vertex Global STEAM Programs

Employee Volunteer Program

Megaworld Foundation, Inc.: Green Thumbs-up!: Megaworld Foundation E-Planting Activity

SAP NS2: NS2 Gives

SMUD: SMUD Cares program

ESG Program of the Year

Hyatt Hotels Corporation: World of Care

Fundraising and Philanthropic Initiative

Santa Cruz Community Credit Union: RETURN THE FAVOR Giving Campaign

The Trevor Project: The Trevor Project’s Partnership with YouTube

Green and Environmental Stewardship

Manulife/John Hancock: Journey to Net Zero

SMUD: 2030 Zero Carbon Plan

SW Safety Solutions Inc: SW 2021 SDG and ECOTEK Awareness Campaign

T-Mobile: T-Mobile’s Sustainability Approach & Achievements

Media Relations or PR Campaign

Aflac: Aflac Engages Media to End Sickle Cell Silence

American Medical Association: Advancing Equity in Medicine

Bospar: Bospar Messes With Texas

Disney Parks, Experiences and Products: Disney Magic Makers

Lowe’s: Lowe’s 100 Hometowns

NOW: Pensions: Fair Pensions For All

Public Health or Safety Initiative

Philip Morris International (PMI): United to Safeguard America from Illegal Trade (USA-IT)

The Jed Foundation (JED): The Jed Foundation (JED)

Report (Annual or One-time) (Print or Digital)

Clyde Group: IDEA Survey & Report

Criteo: Diversity Equity Inclusion and Sustainability Team at Criteo

Webster Financial Corporation: 2020 Environmental: Social and Governance Report

Social Media Campaign

Aflac: Influencing Change with #AflacSickleCellSense

Universal Music Group: Music Is Universal LGBTQ+ Pride celebration

Stakeholder/Employee Engagement

Ameren Corporation: 2021 AMEREN SUSTAINABILITY/ESG ENGAGEMENT

BMC Software: BMC’s CSR and DEI Employee Resources

Megaworld Foundation, Inc.: Rice Together: Megaworld Foundation Community Pantry

Trust & Transparency in Communications

CONSOL Energy Inc.: CONSOL ESG 2021

Renown Health: Embracing Transparency to Transform the Patient Experience

Video or Visual Design

GoDaddy: Made in America

Michigan State University Public Health: Flint Proud: Partners for Change

NXP Semiconductors: SUSTAINABILITY STORIES Magazine

Congrats to all the honorees for 2022!

For more information on our winners, check out their profiles here.

The post Ragan celebrates 2022 CSR Awards: See full list of winners appeared first on PR Daily.

The 2022 Diversity Awards highlighted the best teams, communicators and campaigns across industries, honoring winners who built allyship with their communities internally and externally, made equity strides in their hiring practices, initiated innovative partnerships and alliances with other organizations, and much more.

Ragan Communications and PR Daily hosted an awards luncheon July 14 at New York City’s storied Yale Club in the heart of Manhattan, where attendees were thrilled to gather, network, and dine.

“Communicators are not only sharing the stories of DEI progress with stakeholders, but they are also helping set strategy and holding their organizations accountable for transparency and real change,” says Diane Schwartz, CEO of Ragan. “We are excited to shine a spotlight on their achievements.”

Ragan gave a special honor to Shelley Spector and her team at The Museum of PR, who took the stage to highlight the work that their institution has done fostering public dialogues and conversations with a diverse array of communications leaders from cultures and backgrounds still largely underrepresented in the industry.  After pointing out that inclusion means including everyone, she explained how the PR industry is still largely dominated by women.

“We’re not attracting enough young men into the field,” Spector said. ” So I hope that maybe next year’s event there’ll be an award-winning program about bringing the guys back into the fold.

Ragan Communications and PR Daily congratulate this stellar group of DE&I winners and advocates.

2022 Diversity Awards winners

DE&I Professional of the Year

Lanett Austin: Curaleaf

Vincent Chee: Bevel

Jennifer Rojas Clouse: McLane Company

Ted Nguyen: Orange County Transportation Authority

DE&I Team of the Year

Bazaarvoice: DE&I Taskforce

Clyde Group: IDEA Working Group

McLane Company: DEI Council

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP: Skadden DEI

Allyship

Bospar: Outliers’ Ally

ChristianaCare: Serving Together With Love and Excellence for Inclusion and Diversity

IEEE-USA: Women in Engineering Book Series

CEO Communication

BETAH Associates: Michelle Taylor

Bloomberg Industry Group: Communicating on DE&I At Bloomberg Industry Group – The CEO Setting The Tone

Community Relations and Engagement

Beyond Celiac: Voices of Celiac Disease

Cohen Veterans Network: DEI Engagement for CVN’s Remote Work Environment

Johns Hopkins Medicine: COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Campaign

Mars Food: Introducing Ben’s Original and A New Purpose

OCTA & FSB Public Affairs: OCTA Diverse Communities Trust Building Campaign

PTC: 22K Push Up Challenge

Cultural Celebration or Event

Color Of Change: Black History Now Awards

Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA): Tết Events for the Lunar New Year

Diversity: Equity and Inclusion Commitment

Acronym: Acronym’s DE&I Commitment

Hy-Vee, Inc.: Hy-Vee’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

LinkedIn: Sparking Equal Opportunity via #ConversationsForChange

Mars Food: Introducing Ben’s Original and A New Purpose

Maximus Corporate Communications: DEI at Maximus

Sandia National Laboratories: Sandia Labs’ Social Media: Celebrating diversity, elevating inclusion

Santa Cruz Community Credit Union: SCCCU Commitment to DEI

Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA): SEPTA Diversity, Equity, and Belonging: Where Differences Power Innovation

SPS: DE&I Communications

T-Mobile: Equity In Action

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

Baystate Health: Black Employees Connecting Business Resource Group

BMC Software: BMC’s Employee Resource Groups

Criteo: Diversity Equity Inclusion and Sustainability Team at Criteo

Event (Virtual or Live)

Department of Culture and Tourism: Living the Values Initiative

Florida Realtors: What’s Cooking in Canada and with our Global Partners?

SHE Media: Inclusive Future

Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA): SEPTA Open Book Series, a DEB initiative

Global Diversity: Equity and Inclusion Commitment

Alorica: Alorica’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Cision: DEI at Cision

Criteo: Diversity Equity Inclusion and Sustainability Team at Criteo

Florida Realtors: Kiss Bow or Shake Hands: Diversity Equity and Inclusion A Comparisons of Cultures

Hiring Practices

Cardinal Health: DEI Recruiting Program Enhancements

McLane Company: Warriors to Wheels

Town of Queen Creek: QCPD’s 30×30

Inclusive Language Initiative

AccuWeather: AccuWeather Inclusive Journalism Taskforce

LinkedIn: Inclusive Language in Marketing

Industry Partnerships/Alliances

American College of Allergy: Asthma and Immunology with Allergy & Asthma Network, Eczema in Skin of Color

PRSA/FINN Partners: PRSSA/FINN Partners Mentorship Program

Renown Health: Leaders in Health Equity & Inclusion

Marketing Programs

Mars Food: Introducing Ben’s Original and A New Purpose

SHE Media: Meaningful Marketplaces

Social Justice Campaign

CEO Action for Racial Equity: CEO Action for Racial Equity

Deilight Consulting (UK) Ltd: Ian Clarke

H&S: The Pedestal Project

Training

Alcon: ALCON D&I Training

Cohen Veterans Network: CVN Launches Innovative Diversity Training to Mental Health Providers at No Cost

Congrats to all the honorees for 2022!

For more information on our winners, check out their profiles here.

The post Ragan honors the 2022 Diversity Awards in NYC: list of winners appeared first on PR Daily.

The question of what constitutes inclusive language has been one of the most hotly debated parts of Associated Press style (behind the serial comma). With each year’s new addition to the AP Stylebook, the organization has refreshed its rules around the most inclusive word to describe terms related to race, gender, physical and mental conditions and more.

The 2022 Stylebook goes further with a new inclusive storytelling chapter that focuses on how reporting and editing can ensure accuracy and fairness with a focus on recognizing and overcoming unconscious biases. This involves using intentional language and going beyond your usual sources, for starters.

In a recent Ragan webinar, Paula Froke, AP Stylebook editor and manager of AP’s Nerve Center, shared some context around AP Style’s new inclusive language guidance. These tips not only apply to PR pros, but employee communicators who seek to craft content strategies that spotlight employees in an inclusive, non-tokenizing way.

Make an effort to find underrepresented sources

Froke said that you should make a point to go beyond the regular sources look for those that aren’t routinely represented.

“It’s important to understand what people mean when they talk about a lived experience,” she said. “It’s not tokenism, you’re not just doing it… to check a box. You’re doing it because you really need to make your stories… your conveying of your company’s message, more accurate and meaningful.

Froke explained how finding underrepresented sources for your storytelling can be guided by considering what context and background is appropriate for your subjects to have. This may mean choosing someone other than your CEO or vice president to be the face of a story about your company’s progress.

“Is there someone at some other level that can help depict the story and its effects?” Froke asked the audience.

Rethink the terms you use to describe this work

A large part of the 2022 AP Stylebook’s inclusive language chapter explains how being intentional and precise with your language sets a precedent for inclusivity. This means being as specific as possible with who you’re talking about by avoiding imprecise generalizations and labels.

Here are a few of AP’s inclusive language recommendations:

1. Community. In one example, Froke said the AP Stylebook team discussed the merits of the word “community,” which comes up often when referencing the gay community, the Black community, the Hispanic community and more. She explained why AP added guidance to try and avoid using that term.

“In our view it gives the implication that that those people represent a monolith, or they have some homogeneity, and that they all think and act alike,” she said, with a caveat that there are certain cases where coming up with a better term is not possible and ‘community’ will have to do.

2. Diversity and inclusivity. Froke’s team also recommends you steer away from using these terms as they imply that being a white, non-disabled male is the norm. It’s a reminder that even a single word or phrase holds power.

“We make the point that even a single word that we choose to describe a person or convey a scene can help shape the thoughts and perceptions of readers and listeners,” Froke said, adding that “the terms diversity and inclusivity and inclusion are so widely used that it’s hard not to use them and still be understood.”

3. Avoid dehumanizing “the” terms: Adding “the” to a wide group of people such as the homeless, the blind, the mentally ill or the poor also paints these groups as a monolith. These phrases can be swapped for person-first language (such as referring to people with disabilities) and identity-first language (disabled people).

Froke explained that you should determine which approach a person prefers whenever possible. If you’re unable to determine those preferences, aim for a mix of person-first and identity-first language.

For more on AP Style’s inclusive language chapter and other changes, check out the 2022 AP Stylebook.

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