Brands are at their most memorable when they’re distinctive. We know that brave work commands attention. But the latest PR battleground is a place where creative courage is outranked by other factors.
Here, Smoking Gun’s Chief Storyteller, Carl Stroud, shares his thoughts.
Will PR Be Replaced by AI? No – but It’s About to Make Everything Sound the Same
This is, of course, the wild world of Large Language Models. It is inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini where the fight is on to be the brand they choose to recommend.
And the advice? Feed them what they like: rational messaging, trusted citations, neat little proof points that answer every conceivable use case.
All very sensible. All very beige.
So, will AI replace PR? No. But left unchecked, it will flatten it. Because in the rush to please our new machine overlords, we risk sanding down the rough edges that make a brand interesting in the first place.
The fundamental element of great PR has never been data – it is unbridled, attention-grabbing, scroll-stopping creativity. And that, of course, is something LLMs fundamentally can’t grasp.
That is because they don’t understand meaning. They don’t think; they predict. They’re the world’s most efficient copywriters – and the least interesting ones.
Ask an AI to describe five British beer brands, and you’ll get the same adjectives every time: ‘crafted’, ‘authentic’, ‘refreshing’. You’d think every pint in Britain was poured by a bearded man called Tom in a converted railway arch. Type in “beauty brand mission” and you’ll get the usual sermon: empowering confidence and committed to innovation.
Type in “beauty brand mission” and you’ll get the usual sermon: empowering confidence and committed to innovation.
The biggest danger ahead is that we create a giant feedback loop – where EVERYTHING sounds exactly the same.
What AI Can (and Will) Do in PR
To be clear, AI isn’t the enemy here – it’s a genuinely useful pair of hands. Used well, it’s very good at the grunt work: scanning coverage and monitoring media in real time, crunching sentiment and audience data, producing a rough first draft at speed, and pulling together reporting that can eat up a Friday afternoon.
This is less of a threat to PR and actually an advantage, as this frees up the time and headspace needed for the part that AI can’t do.
What AI Can’t Do: The Human Edge
Because there’s a limit to what prediction can achieve. AI can assemble a proof point; it can’t tell you why that proof point should make someone feel something. A few things remain stubbornly, usefully human:
- Creative distinctiveness: Spotting the angle nobody else would think to run with, rather than the average of everything that’s ever been written on the subject
- Emotional intelligence: Knowing which story will actually move an audience, not just which one ticks the brief
- Ethical judgment: Recognising when a message is technically accurate but the wrong thing to say, and having the nerve to say so
- Relationship-building and crisis counsel: The trust built with a journalist over years, or the instinct for what to say (and what to hold back) in the first hour of a crisis
The irony is that the more we polish messaging to appeal to algorithms, the blander it gets. And that risks sparking a doom spiral where beige becomes the benchmark.
In essence we’re sleepwalking into brand language being written by a spreadsheet.
And in the process, we risk losing the very thing PR exists to protect: distinctiveness.
Yes, of course, we need to feed LLMs the right information to increase brand visibility and discoverability. But we risk sliding back onto the same slippery slope that defined the SEO era – where rational messaging takes the front seat and creative storytelling gets shoved in the boot.
Tasks vs. Roles: What Actually Changes
It’s worth differentiating tasks and roles and AI’s relation to them, because they’re not the same thing.
AI absorbs tasks, such as monitoring, first drafts, data-crunching, and reporting. What it doesn’t do is absorb roles. The strategist, the storyteller, the crisis counsel: these roles don’t disappear because of AI; they instead evolve. All this means is that individuals spend less time on the mechanical work and more on the judgement calls that a machine still can’t make.
5 Ways to Keep Your Brand Un-Boring in the Age of AI
With AI’s ability to produce the right wording as and when needed, the homogenisation of brands and their messaging is at risk of becoming increasingly common. To make your brand stand out among the rest while staying afloat within the ever-evolving AI landscape, make sure to:
Protect Your Distinctiveness
If your messaging could be swapped with a competitor’s and nobody would notice, it’s not doing its job.
Lead with Human Storytelling
Facts inform a story, but they rarely are the story alone. Find the emotionally charged, unexpected angle first.
Keep a Human Hand on Ethics and Oversight
Someone still needs to ask, “Should we say this?” not just, “Can we say this?”
Treat AI as a Collaborator, Not an Author
Let AI handle the first draft or the data crunch, then make sure a person rewrites it with a voice.
Feed LLMs the Right Proof Points, Without Going Beige
Give the algorithm what it needs to find you, without letting it dictate how you sound.
The Brands That Win Won’t Sound Like AI
In our rush to be AI-ready, we risk becoming creatively sterile. Because great PR has never been about rational messaging alone. It’s about uncovering those cracks where the light gets in.
It is transforming proof points into something emotionally charged, unexpected and unforgettable.
Our role isn’t to echo what the algorithm expects – it’s to surprise it. To keep stories human, messy, funny, moving and unpredictable.
As the race to optimise content for AI gathers pace, as an industry and with us as a content creation agency, we have to maintain focus and continue to find new ways to keep brand work unpredictable, emotionally intelligent, and unmistakably human. Brands that sound like someone, not something, are the ones that audiences remember.
Brands that sound like someone, not something are the ones that audiences remember.
And the brands that win the next decade won’t be those who use AI best, but those who sound least like it.
AI is reshaping brand discovery. Don’t get lost.
Through the power of earned media, combined with the techniques of performance marketing, we can help you play to the rules of modern visibility – while never compromising on brand storytelling that’s memorable, intelligent and unmistakably human.
Our PR,influencer and social media campaigns move audiences to action and help you to achieve your business goals.
See how Smoking Gun is helping brands grow AI share of voice here.
Need a comms strategy to capitalise on the opportunities and avoid the trip-ups of AI-visibility? Speak to Smoking Gun today, and our award-winning team can discuss how we can help you further through our services as a forward-thinking GEO agency. You can also find out more about how we put our expertise to work and deliver clear impact in our GEO case study.
