AI may be a useful tool, but it will never get us humans

I was once told by a senior leader at a health charity that within five years or so, nearly all communications jobs would be lost to AI.

Interestingly, this person didn’t foresee a similar future for project management roles in their own field. But I have to confess I did have a few alarming thoughts about the future for communication professionals the other day.

Someone in a training session I was running for fundraisers used ChatGPT to make an impressive start on a written exercise aimed at potential donors.

Whenever I’ve experimented with AI the writing it has produced has been a bingo game in dull corporate speak… but I’m obviously not doing it right because what this came up with was stylistically quite impressive.

Ultimately though only bits were actually usable, because while ChatGPT delivered some nice turns of phrase, it didn’t understand the human relationships at the core of the communication – between the organisation and its collaborators, and between the fundraisers and the donors.

That meant it wasn’t presenting the relationship dynamics in the right way, or directing the audience’s interests and desire to interact to the right place.

It’s this relationship business which I think will stop us all handing over communication functions en masse to the computers.

As I remember being taught on my science communication masters many years ago, communication is about so much more than just transfer of information. It’s a ritual we all participate in, with complex cultural rules of engagement. And from that academic observation follows certain practical realities.

Communication involves two-way interaction, in which you should know as much as possible about who you are trying to communicate with, and they should know who is trying to engage with them. It is rich with repetitive, ritualistic exchanges that reinforce the relationship between the parties.

When you view it that way, you can see AI becoming an increasingly useful tool to help communication professionals design an appropriate message for an audience – but it’s harder to imagine AI becoming one of the parties to the engagement itself.

I’m thinking now of the some of the charities I work with as a consultant, who have close, collaborative relationships with their communities.

Communication with your community is never a case of beaming out information. You’re interacting, exchanging, listening and empathising. And these communications are precious... they're crucial for understanding your purpose and shaping your future strategies and priorities.

So let’s all keep experimenting with AI and taking from it what we can... but we should be very careful about outsourcing our human relationships to an algorithm.