AI is going to be great for spray-and-pray PRs, God help us
More and longer public relations pitches turns out to be another price of the AI Golden Age.
I am literally studying, in a structured academic way, the unintended consequences of AI systems, even while reporting on the way it upends information symmetry.
And yet, until this week I never realised it is going to get my inbox flooded with long PR pitches.
If you don’t live in my neighborhood, there’s a social hierarchy to public relations practitioners. At the top are the deep strategic thinkers who whisper into the right ears and make things happen. At the bottom are the spammers, who grab any old mailing list and spew out press releases and interview pitches.
Most PRs are somewhere in the middle, because most of the time they’re playing a numbers game, and some clients want to see dissemination-effort statistics, bless their vain hearts.
For more than two decades I have ignored better than 99% of all those pitch emails because they are a terrible way to go about story discovery. There are gems in the muck, absolutely, but nothing worth the time investment of even a cursory scan of every email that comes in.
So I have, you know, a little bit of unread email.
I also don’t have time to waste on inbox hygiene, and storage is cheap, so I have a lot of email. Now AI has turned that into an asset.
“Hey Gemini,” I said jokingly, “find me a source on this [extremely niche technical subject] with a phone number.”
And there it was, exactly the missing piece I needed, in an unregarded pitch email from four months ago.
That changes all the incentives. I neither know whether nor care if that PR sent me a hundred pieces of junk. I need them to be verbose rather than pithy, the better for my machine to categorise the people they are putting forward. Hell, they can even throw in a couple of attached whitepapers and reports, why not?
Spray-and-pray PR used to be a lottery. Now it is an investment.
God help us all.