A TECH site so SAVVY WE CAN'T EVEN GET CAPS LOCK TURNED OFF HERE... we're a work in progress for a few weeks. judge us in october! be kind until then.
A site designed to solve all your PR, communication and AI problems - and show off what's cool
WTF! This stuff is cool
There's a lot of great tools and ideas out there - stuff that will make you go WTF!
Let's not fool ourselves though - there's also a lot of stuff out there that makes you go 'huh?' Sadly, there's also a lot of snake oil and bullshitters out there - and we look to make sure you don't get caught out by any of that.
WTF? How is this stuff meant to work?
Answering some quick questions...
Who is behind the site?
It wont't all be written by him, but the site (especially the bad jokes) is the brainchild of Craig McGill, an ex-tech journalist and editor who wrote for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Press and Journal, The Daily Mirror, and The Scotsman on many tech stories as well as being a news and features writer at TIME, SFX, and other media outlets. He is the author of four non-fiction books to date and his non-journalistic career has seen him hold senior communications and PR positions at global giants like 8x8, EPAM, PwC, Weber Shandwick, and other organisations.
Additionally, he created the Scottish Social Media Dinners, designed to bring together Scotland's (then) developing digital creative community. He was also the founder of one of Scotland's first profitable digital content agencies, Contently Managed. He continues to live in Scotland but works across the globe.
What's the tone of the site going to be?
Serious with a questioning tone and shades of sarcasm and levity.
Should the PR industry even be engaging with AI - isn't it bad for the environment, full of 'stolen' copyright material, and a bad business model?
This is something that only each individual can answer for themself and, as always, nobody should be forced into using tools or engaging in ways that they do not wish to do.
On the environment front... Open AI CEO Sam Altman claims it uses less than one second of an oven cooking, which doesn't sound so bad - but that's per prompt. Consider how many prompts are taking place on a daily basis. The graphic to the right (from the excellent Engineering Prompts newsletter) tries to put it into perspective.
On the copyright and morality front... I have a huge amount of sympathy on this one, especially as I'm led to believe my own books were used in at least one LLM (and no one asked for my permission). Some of this argument is very similar to early days of the internet where copyright was also nebulous in many parts of the web and email groups, well before p2p was a large scale thing.
Having said that, AI's are now influencing too much for PR people to be able to sit this one out. People are using chatbots - rightly or wrongly - instead of Google. That means PRs have a responsibility to be aware of the tools and know how to use them.
Lastly, as for the business models of the companies? People like Ed Zitron have written a lot about it. There will be winners and losers, that's for sure - but the genie is out the bottle now and highly unlikely to ever go back in.
Is this actual AI that we are all using?
No. Far from it, but as with some companies claiming they have full self-driving modes, we are stuck with the phrasing that's made it out into the public consciousness. I'll let you decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
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