Yes, it’s another bloody article about AI. But bear with me, because I think a trend is emerging that will change the way PR practitioners go about their daily business – and frankly, it’ll be quite refreshing.

Some context

Have we reached peak digital comms? It certainly feels that way. We’ve catapulted from ‘content is king’ to content-is-everywhere-and-everything in what feels like a nanosecond, but in reality has taken around a decade. Reliance on digital comms as a means of brand awareness has changed the face of what PR fundamentally is – which is making connections, managing a reputation, and sparking a meaningful, beneficial and/or interesting dialogue between a person or brand, and its ‘public’.

See: the leap from print to online (though we are seeing a gratifying number of titles going back to print – see our recent blog), the migration of content from publishing platforms (online magazines) to social media platforms that are unedited and unvetted (and who resolutely refuse to acknowledge themselves as such – quality control, what?) – leading to vast amounts of content bilge being pumped out faster than a Thames Water storm pipe. 

And the aim? To garner as many views, impressions and other increasingly meaningless metrics so marketing teams appease the Board.

In early  2025, AI bots went from 1 visit per 200 human visits, to 1 per 31 human visits by the end of the year – this exponential growth in machine generated traffic means that we’re moving towards an online world where machines are the main audience, and humans are squeezed out. 

Yikes. 

In some sectors, AI bots account for a significant share of traffic. That’s not human engagement or attention – that is AI talking to AI. 

Quantity, it seems, has become more valuable than quality. 

A tipping point

Generative AI is here (have you heard?), and as a result we’ve reached the nadir of the ‘content is king’ age. To the untrained, or unfussy, eye GenAI is impressive. Certainly  enough to sit alongside the content on most of the big social platforms. 

But we’ve behaved like lemmings off a cliff with the technology. Churning GenAI content out so fast in some kind of panic, becau§se volume, and leaping to say something (anything?) is URGENT – because competitors and peers are doing it, SO WE SHOULD BE TOO.

*Deep breaths* 

Since when was a reputation forged on being a lemming? How many companies ask for a rebrand so they look and sound the same as everyone else? Put simply – they don’t. 

People want to stand out from the crowd and gravitate towards brands that chime with their individuality. But in a world of convenience – where we can outsource opinion and thought to a machine – we’re zombie-walking into blandness. 

Back to that tipping point. The speed at which GenAI has seeped into our lives is now starting to elicit wariness – 55% of audiences feel uncomfortable with AI-heavy websites, and in a consumer content trust survey, only 12% trusted AI-generated marketing content compared to 45% for user-generated formats. 

People are back-pedalling, realising that aside from factual inaccuracies, hallucinations and dodgy data, we’re at risk of losing our voice by delegating the task of thinking to our robot pals. 

Not only that, in the world of PR we are currently fighting for space in already crowded journalist inboxes, against oodles of AI generated news. And this is a big issue.

Jane Hamilton, appointments editor at The Times, explains it best in a LinkedIn post: 

“Journalists are being bombarded by low-rent, AI slop releases.

“People buy people,” she wrote. “AI content doesn’t inspire the same connection and emotions as beautifully-crafted human work – be that writing, music or a picture. There is a chance here for genuine human talent to stand out and be premium.”

Jane continues that AI writing is “the ready-meal of the writing world…

“It looks shiny and appealing on top, but crack through the surface and it’s bland and tasteless.”

Get back to what you know

And here’s where it gets interesting. The backlash that we’re in the early stages of, will, I believe, direct PR agencies back towards the fundamental strengths of the discipline; thoughtful engagement with journalists, audiences and brands – leveraging human-led storytelling as a premium service where brands invest in human communicators, rather than outsourcing to algorithms. 

In time, I firmly believe we’ll see a resurgence of physical and hybrid events, as brands crave in-person interactions, real conversations, and the opportunity to get in front of real people. PR teams will help shape the narrative for these events, guide the conversations and make those vital connections between brand and audience with clear messaging and a great story, told well.

‘Authentic’ is an overused word these days, but in its true sense it’s something PR has always strived to be – and we should remember that.

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