A journalist friend of mine told me recently that she can now identify an AI-generated press release within the first sentence. Not because AI cannot write — it can, and in some technical respects it writes better than many PR practitioners I have encountered. She can identify it because AI writes PR copy the way a very eager intern does: technically correct, tonally perfect, completely devoid of any actual human reason to care.
The AI press release uses all the right words in all the right order. It hits all the approved messaging pillars. It includes a quote that sounds exactly like what a CEO quote is supposed to sound like — because it has been trained on ten thousand CEO quotes and has distilled them into their most generic, inoffensive, forgettable essence. ‘We are thrilled to announce this exciting milestone as we continue to innovate and deliver value for our customers and stakeholders.’ No journalist in the history of journalism has ever read that sentence and thought: I must cover this immediately.
The use of AI in PR content production is not inherently wrong. I use AI tools myself — for research, for first-draft structure, for editing passes that I don’t have time for at 11pm before a client deadline. AI as a thinking partner and efficiency tool is entirely legitimate. AI as a replacement for the human judgement that makes communication actually communicate — that is where we have a serious problem.
The core issue is that communication is fundamentally a human act. It works when it creates a genuine connection between one human’s perspective and another human’s understanding. The press release that gets a journalist’s attention is the one where they can feel a real person behind it — a person who thought carefully about why this particular journalist should care about this particular story on this particular day. That thought process cannot be outsourced to a language model.
What AI cannot replicate is the media relationship insight that says: this journalist just published a piece on exactly this topic, and here is why our client’s story adds a dimension they haven’t covered yet. It cannot replicate the instinct that says: this story needs to wait three weeks because something happening in the market right now would make it irrelevant. It cannot replicate the courage to tell a client that their announcement is not newsworthy and here is what would make it so.
Use AI. It will make you faster, and used well, it will make your first drafts better. But never let it replace the thinking. The thinking is the job. The writing is just where the thinking becomes visible. And right now, far too many press releases are making it very visible indeed that no real thinking happened at all.
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