In the first two parts of our three-part series examining generative AI, we laid the foundation for understanding the role generative AI can play for PR and communications professionals and some key factors to consider when deciding how to implement it. Essentially:
AI is unlikely to take your job, but a person who is more adept at using it than you are might.
Going all-in on generative AI or ignoring it completely comes with plenty of risks, so it's best to start experimenting and testing it out.
Hopefully, you've been convinced to embrace AI as a force multiplier and begun exploring how it can supercharge your efficiency and effectiveness. But you don’t need to take just my word for it. Pfizer's Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Sussman did a great job recently of explaining her thought process and plan of action for "getting started" as a communicator in AI. So with all that in mind, we’ve outlined some initial resources, references, influencers, and digital tools to help you kick off your own AI journey:
Prompt Writing
Generative AI is only as effective as the user instructing it on what to do and how to do it. Writing accurate and specific prompts is the first step in getting useful results from AI tools. Try these resources to get started with writing effective prompts – or to take your current capability to the next level:
· SnackPrompt: Consider this the "town square" of prompt-writing knowledge, a user-driven community to find the latest tips, tricks, and hacks for writing the most effective prompts – and a forum for crowdsourcing prompt-writing challenges.
· AI Prompt Genius: This free, open-source browser extension helps integrate ChatGPT into the standard web browsing and web research experience by making it easier to generate, save, and reuse common ChatGPT prompts deployed to summarize and query information from online resources.
· Prompt Writing Cheat Sheets & Quick References: If you're looking for a short, summarized version of the basics of crafting prompts for generative AI, hundreds of infographics exist. We like this one from Hasan Toor and this one from Zain Kahn.
Digital Tools
At Gladius, we've been test-driving a wide variety of AI tools to determine which ones best help each of us supercharge our individual skill sets. Moreover, we’re trying to discover which ones enable us as a team to deliver better results for our clients and help them better understand the potential impact that generative AI can have on their communications teams. Here are a few of the droids we've found particularly useful as co-pilots for our X-Wing:
· Canva: While not an AI-specific tool, Canva is a powerful and user-friendly design app that makes graphic design accessible to many non-designers. Its primary capability is not a secret to most communicators. Still, Canva has also recently added a robust suite of AI-driven apps to its interface that allows users to generate royalty-free images from text, program and insert talking AI presenters into designs, erase background items from images, and easily compose background audio effects.
· Grammarly AI: Among a crowded field of generative AI writing and editing tools, Grammarly and its recently added AI capabilities stands out for their consistency, ease of use, and ability to integrate into web browsers, Office 365, and email platforms.
· SciSpace Copilot: One of the most valuable aspects of AI we've discovered is its ability to streamline tedious tasks like desk research. As communicators, we are often called upon to quickly get up to speed on a particular topic, technology, or issue. However, digesting extensive information to gain that understanding can be time-consuming. SciSpace Copilot is a Google Chrome plugin that helps summarize and explain website text, math equations, tables, technical information, and scientific research literature to speed up the process of "getting smart" on a topic. In addition to summarizing these things, the tool allows a user to interact by asking questions about the information being analyzed to dive deeper. It can also analyze information in 13 languages, providing summaries and answering questions in a user's native language.
· Glasp: YouTube can be a valuable resource to help you quickly and efficiently perform background research to better understand an issue or a client's industry. Glasp is a browser plugin that creates a transcript of any video and then produces an AI-generated summary. The plugin opens a window in the YouTube user interface that provides a video transcript and allows ChatGPT to summarize or answer questions based on the transcript. This tool can help you digest hours of video content in a fraction of that time.
· Scribe: This tool leverages AI to streamline the development of standard procedures, training materials, and how-to guides – which are often crucial tools in successful change management and communications initiatives.
· Supercreator: Short-form video is fast becoming one of the primary channels for internal and external communication. AI-powered video content apps can help create short, social-friendly videos in less than 5 minutes to help feed audiences' seemingly insatiable demand for video content.
· Opus Clip: In addition to creating original short-form video content, AI-driven tools like Opus Clip can also help modify and segment existing long-form video content into more digestible and shareable shorter clips for use on various platforms.
· StockImage.AI: Never use clip art again! As an alternative to purchasing stock imagery or using a human designer or photographer to create original imagery, we can now generate royalty-free stock imagery for communications assets from text prompts using AI. While we still leverage talented human creatives for strategic and customized imagery for flagship assets, these tools work great for imagery for social media posts and presentations. StockImage.AI is a solid resource, and Canva also has an excellent text-to-image app integrated into its standard design interface.
· Decktopus: You've probably created what feels like a billion PowerPoint decks in your career. As enticing as it might sound, we wouldn't recommend handing off the entire presentation creation process to an AI tool (at least not yet). But Decktopus helps you get a jumpstart on creating decks based on some initial text input and previously created slides. We've found it particularly useful for building internal/non-client decks without starting from scratch.
Resources/Influencers
It seems like every day brings a new wave of AI tools, tactics, tips, and processes, so it’s essential to try and stay current on what's changing and newly available. Since we’re communicators and not AI researchers, we've identified several online sources to help us understand the latest and greatest news on generative AI tools. There are thousands of sources out there, but some that we like are:
· "Angry Tom"
· Coursera
Super piece! I bookmarked it for reference, and am busily exploring some of the tools you mentioned.