Communications agency in the time of content creation AI?

Image by a human, Ave-Lii Idavain: an uphill battle of woman against machine? We think not!

The timing of our company’s launch this winter seems unfortunate: everyone is talking about the range of AI text and image generators that put writers and designers out of business. Why pay a messy human to create an article or illustration from a prompt when an AI can do it in seconds for pennies? And why would someone claiming to be all for science and technology create something as anachronistic as a communications agency?

Short answer: because it’s not anachronistic at all, but in fact a wonderful match. With AI being this capable and humans this insightful, imagine what we can do together!

Image by Midjourney: a combination of a Baltic pine (mänd in Estonian) and surgical instruments on a metal tray

Having made my career in PR, communications, journalism and marketing, I know my work is allegedly all about reorganizing words on paper to make things sound pretty. If this were indeed true, a text-generation AI would be a dire threat to my livelihood. However, this output is but a tip of an iceberg. The real work is and has always been about talking to the right people, figuring out who they could reach out to, understanding what they want to say, recognizing what parts in their message are relevant to their audience, deciding on the best way to deliver that message to those people – and only then creating the content. Then you have to monitor if and how the message reached the desired people and if and how they understood it. Finally you use that information to start an improved version of the cycle all over again.

An AI doesn’t do this, at least not yet. You’ll have to count on people.

Our agency’s tagline is “Giving a voice to future makers”, and we definitely see AI content creators as part of that future. When those creators work ethically we will not shy away from them, but study and use them to get the best of both worlds. I am not writing this text with ink and a quill, after all, so why would I deny myself another tool?

We’re all about giving people glimpses of an even brighter future.

Angina Herrmann

Co-Founder

P.S. Just to toot my own horn a bit: I find the texts written by AI creators so far quite boring and unimaginative. Until they learn to delight me, I will still trust my own handiwork when it comes to finalizing a story.