SIU PRSSA Southern Illinois University Public Relations Student Society of America
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Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been making its way into our everyday lives for quite some time now, but recently, it has made its way into social media. On February 27, Snapchat released a series of social media posts and a press release saying they are introducing My AI, an experimental Chat-GPT-powered bot, to its Snapchat+ subscribers.
The feature will allow you to interact with the bot through direct messaging, and it’s pinned to the top of your chat feed. The feature is customizable, and can also recommend ideas, answer questions, and join groups with other users.
The bot was intended to give users another way to engage with the app and to be a helpful tool, but users quickly disagreed. After releasing My AI to all Snapchat users in April, there have been many concerns about the bot. One of the main concerns is that you cannot remove the bot from your chat feed unless you are a Snapchat+ subscriber and privacy issues. According to John Edwards, the information commissioner for Reuters, “The provisional findings of our investigation suggest a worrying failure by Snap to adequately identify and assess the privacy risks to children and other users before launching ‘My AI.'”
In August, users noticed how My AI posted its own story and stopped responding to messages. Snapchat has since fixed the issue and claimed it was a temporary outage. However, users took to social media to express their concerns and now are calling for the feature to be removed.
With AI becoming a part of our everyday life, it has boiled over into the job scene. While AI cannot display human intelligence or emotions, it can be a helpful tool by providing new ways to be efficient for careers like public relations and journalism.
According to a Forbes article written by Jenna Guarneri, PR professionals can use AI to “incorporate data analytics, adopt text-to-speech technology, practice personalization, and predict the chances of a pitch earning coverage.”
With both the PR field and AI growing, we are seeing how they can work hand-in-hand. AI can help PR professionals create press releases, analysis, research, media monitoring, and so much more. Although AI can’t replace PR professionals, we’re witnessing how helpful AI can be in the PR field.
