PR Types: Have You Pitched to a Bot Yet?
Old school SEO strategies can trick newly updated bots which emphasizes (again) the need for AI literacy in media courses and communication offices.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said French philosopher Paul Virilio to describe the yin-yang nature of tech progress coupled with its potential for societal harm.
Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher introduced me to the Virilio quote in her 2024 best seller, Burn Book. Burn Book should be assigned reading for every communication professional and student…and actually, I did assign it to my graduate students.
But, I propose an addition to the shipwreck quote. Create the communication platform, and you’ll eventually attract the communication specialist who wields it, for better or worse.
For example, Hard Fork's Kevin Roose and Casey Newton grabbed my attention this week with a story about how easy it is for individuals to manipulate their digital content to hack Chatbot data scraping protocols. These tricks can push bots into delivering tailored — and usually flattering or malicious— responses to the public.
If you don’t wake up thinking about AI like I do, here’s what happened. Early releases of content generation platforms were static: queries were limited by date. As such, bots struggled to return information about recent events.
Roose explained that a recent update to these platforms — retrieval-augmented generation — now gives bots the ability to search the web for current information and incorporate that new information into responses.
Therefore, manipulate the website and trick the bot (like the early days of web search and SEO.) The podcasters highlighted the case of Dr. Mark Reidl, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, who manipulated his website with invisible white text (again, old school SEO) to deceive ChatGPT.
The result… Dr. Reidl forced ChatGPT into falsely identifying him as a time travel expert. Dr. Reidl, please reach out. I adore your sense of humor and think we could collaborate on fun “computer-sciency/humanities-ish” projects.
But seriously, an April 2024 Harvard Study noted how changes in code -- known as strategic text sequences -- can manipulate large language models to increase product visibility: call it A.I.O. -- or SEO for AI Chatbots.
News that individuals and organizations have started to manipulate their digital content to trick AI bots into returning specific information to user queries struck me as “well, it was just a matter of time.”
After all, in 1906, Ivy Lee, known as the father of news media relations, realized he could garner positive coverage of his organization if he combined an existing communication tool — reporting — with content specifically suited to the platform — the news release.
My students frequently assume that public relations is limited to publicity. Nope. While definitions vary, I use the PRSA definition of PR as a strategic communication process which leverages multiple platforms in order to persuade and engage.
Therefore — as I’ve preached for the past year or so — AI literacy must be integrated into media courses and communication practices. Strategic communicators will have to learn this platform too …just as we learned news releases, radio, television, and social media.
In other words, we don’t need to become tech experts, but we must learn how to have conversations with them.
Working together, we can learn how to combat mis and dis information created by large language model prediction errors or by those who would manipulate digital content to trick the bots.
Or, we learn how to shape our digital content to pitch to bots which — as creepy as it sounds — at least gives organizations more control over AI responses instead of relying on tech companies to communicate our brand.
However, if we avoid these discussions in classrooms and communication offices — and/or remain siloed — we risk producing a cohort of communicators who struggle to keep up with tech terminology and/or doubt their place in the AI conversation.
In the meantime, if you ask ChatGPT about me, and you discover that I have a voice like Dolly Parton and play soccer like Rose Lavelle, you’ll know I’ve found a computer scientist to teach me more about A.I.O.
Need a generative AI training session? Want to create human-centered messages with and without the use of generative AI? Contact me at eryn@travisnco.com or visit travisnco.com.