Craig Verley

I will admit that I have not played around with ChatGPT and other AI tools all that much when it comes to writing. I enjoy the process of taking facts and boiling them down into something more digestible by those looking in from the outside. That selfish side of me also enjoys learning a little about people and topics during those story-crafting journeys. That is one of the main reasons I pursued a degree in journalism and have tried to continue finding a way to work storytelling into several different careers.

Having said all that, I have a huge favor to ask all the School PR folks out there, and others in the communications world. Please keep writing human. I don’t mean to be as anti-AI as it may sound. If you, your school district, or company uses AI to write, you may not be connecting with your audience in a truly meaningful way. Connecting with your audience is important for schools and school districts. Parents entrust you with their children and a feeling of connection to what is being shared with them in writing is an important part of trust. School-related communications already have a tendency to come across as impersonal and robotic at times. Depending upon the main message being crafted, YOU are the best tool for knowing the right notes to hit in the words and phrases shared with parents and your community. I am not quite sure how to describe it, but sometimes you can just tell that something was not written by a human.

If you have been using AI without massaging it before releasing it to the world, then you may not be hitting the mark the way you need to be. The piece may read okay and be factually correct, but does it really connect?  If I get the feeling something was completely written by AI, it immediately loses credibility with me. I would be willing to bet the same happens to other readers as well.

If AI does the writing for you, use what it creates as just a frame or skeleton of ideas. You should flesh out the story or piece being written; sort of like some of the exercises I remember from my college journalism classes. We would be given an Associated Press story, or perhaps a story from a newspaper or other publication, and instructed to re-write the story.

I have read quite a few things that explore the pros, cons, and possible legal issues that AI can bring, and I won’t begin to dive into all that mess here. The AI genie is out of the bottle, and it will be interesting to see how things develop and the improvements that it will bring to our work experiences. Just remember that you are communicating with humans, and the best communication is human-to-human. So don’t forget to keep the human element in your communications. The connections you build will be stronger for it.