In the Media

For years, the conversation about AI has centered on its future worth. It was positioned as something to look forward to or prepare for. Something to be excited about or fear.

Finding the human angle and defining success with a tech-forward, product-led philosophy

AI is undoubtedly the hottest tech topic of our current era. Right now, the companies that make generative AI models and the organizations that rely on them are all jockeying for mindshare, attempting to capture the limelight as they position themselves as thought leaders. It all but feels inevitable that AI will transition from tech innovation into table stakes within a matter of years — so how can you command the narrative when developing or implementing AI solutions is no longer a competitive differentiator?

 

Here’s what we’re looking at as we navigate toward an AI-powered future

By Jason Mayde, Head of Information Technology at Highwire

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—except for the pivotal announcements, distinguished speakers, and innovative themes everyone is talking about from HLTH this year. Last week, over 12,000 healthcare leaders convened to explore transformative approaches to AI in healthtech, spread awareness of critical health issues, and empower attendees to envision a future of healthcare and the actionable ways to achieve it.

“A” and “I.” Two letters that will dominate the conversations and presentations at HLTH 2024 next week. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the healthcare industry, from how patients receive care to how professionals are trained and how insurers manage risk. You may have a great AI story to tell at HLTH 2024, but the challenge will be how to attract the attention of the media, analysts, and attendees amidst all the AI-related chatter/noise. 

Last week, members from Highwire’s cybersecurity practice touched down in D.C. On their agenda: attending both the Aspen Cyber Summit and POLITICO’s AI and Tech Summit to hear firsthand what government and private officials are focused on regarding the future of our national security and the cybersecurity risks around AI. 

The HTLH conference emerged on the healthcare conference scene in 2018, featuring notable speakers and quirky caricatures. It has since become a leading industry conference, attracting over 12,000 attendees and receiving nearly 3,000 speaking applications.

Over the past month and a half, Highwire’s cybersecurity practice has been focused on planning for one of the industry’s most pivotal annual events: Black Hat USA. This year, #HWCyberSquad members from across the country landed in Las Vegas to connect with the top security professionals in the biz, as well as learn more about what is top of mind for those on the front lines of our nation’s cyber defenses. 

Our health practice works with clients at the intersection of AI, innovation, and healthcare. Therefore, we’re constantly monitoring the media for trends in this space and reading the latest coverage on how this technology is impacting the healthcare industry. 

Today’s media landscape is shifting rapidly. As PR professionals engaging with the media every day, it’s crucial to continue to tap in with reporters to get a sense of how they are perceiving the latest news, trends driving their headlines and the latest discussions taking place in editorial rooms. To make sure that we, as PR professionals, are pitching stories that hit the mark for readers, I chatted with Eoin Higgins, IT Reporter at IT Brew to learn more about what he's most interested in, and what IT Brew readers are looking for. Eoin’s work focuses on cybersecurity, IT jobs, and government tech. Eoin has been a professional writer for over eight years—a career he stumbled into after answering an ad at a local paper in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Eoin’s work has appeared in many outlets globally, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Intercept, the New Statesman, the Appeal, and many others.

AWS is synonymous with cloud computing and has solidified its position as a pioneer in security. This was evident at AWS re:Inforce 2024, where a series of groundbreaking announcements and discussions underscored the company's relentless pursuit of a secure cloud environment. 

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the crème de la crème of advertising industry events, bringing together top brands to showcase and discuss new trends, products, and innovation. This year’s festival was no exception, catalyzing key industry conversations for the rest of 2024.

This last year was monumental for AI in healthcare. From hands-free charting to detailed and documented patient visits to using AI to identify signs of diseases within retinal scans, how AI is being used in healthcare is extraordinary. 

Highwire collaborated with a client to create a real-world test of AI-created, human-edited content. Can the machine drive value as well as volume?

We begin this blog post by assuring you that the words you are reading were written by a real, honest-to-goodness human. 

A strange disclaimer, perhaps, but an important one given the growing number of online articles written by artificially intelligent bots these days. Not just from third-rate publications, either. Sources as mainstream as the Associated Press, Washington Post, BBC, Bloomberg and many others are publishing articles written by, or at least with the help of, A.I. 

And while most of those articles are for fairly straightforward, templatized stories such as sports reports, financial news, and real estate trends, the mere fact that so many articles come from an A.I. bot instead of a journalist is cause to examine whether that’s actually a good thing. Are we really ready to trust the bots to take over the media? 

The benefits to a publisher — and, as in Highwire's case, a PR and marketing agency — for relying on computers to write articles are both clear and multitudinous: They are cost effective, they are fast, they don’t plagiarize, and they don’t take sick days. 

But the inherent dangers are fairly obvious as well. Can we trust that the bots are pulling from the best sources? Do computers really know what we’ll find meaningful? Will this usher the decline of storytelling as art? 

Despite our concerns, we decided to give the A.I. writing assistants Jasper and ChatGPT a try. Jasper and ChatGPT are two of a growing number of A.I.-powered writing assistants, along with Peppertype.ai, Writesonic, Anyword and more, that claim to help marketers write blog posts, sales emails, SEO content, and other marketing collateral up to 10X faster. 

The way they generally work is that you plug in a bit of information about your company, its audience, the topic that you want the A.I. bot to write about, and maybe the tone of voice that you want it to use. It will then spit back to you an outline or in some cases a fully fleshed out blog post for you to either edit as you see fit or publish as is. 

Our first impression was that the resulting blog posts were … surprisingly good. Not nearly as good as the first drafts submitted by our writers, but not so bad that they were incoherent or unreadable. Perhaps our expectations were low, but the fact that the blog posts actually made sense and weren’t completely unstructured gave us hope. 

And yet, after several tries, we began to realize that the blog posts were lacking in several crucial areas. Their sentences made sense and were grammatically correct, but none rose anywhere close to the level of prose. They reported the facts just fine but were unable to connect the dots in any meaningful way. And while the tone of voice was perhaps less robotic than we had expected, it was far from fresh or exciting. 

Where we found Jasper and ChatGPT useful was in outlining and organizing topics to be addressed in an article, and in generating ideas for angles and storylines to cover. It’s not that these tools provided better outlines or ideas than we could have come up with ourselves, because they didn’t, but they did provide those outlines and ideas very quickly – like, in seconds – that would have taken us 30 minutes or an hour to research, brainstorm and organize. 

But where Jasper and ChatGPT fall short is in the most crucial aspects of content generation. It’s the part that makes reading content worthwhile in the first place, the part that makes us think and feel, the part that makes us happy to be alive. It’s reading something that inspires us to do our work better or to live our lives more deeply. It’s connecting the dots in a way that makes us see the world a little more clearly. It’s delivering insights that leave us somehow different from the people we were before. 

Those might be lofty goals for a blog post or bylined article. Not every blog post is meant to change your life, after all. But every blog post can and should at least make you feel as if you’ve connected with another human being, if even just to smile or nod in recognition of another person’s thoughts. 

And that’s where Jasper and ChatGPT fell short. Their articles felt… dry. Canned. As if they had regurgitated what they’d read but hadn’t actually learned the base material. 

Perhaps the day will come when artificially intelligent bots can learn to write like humans. That’s a larger question for people much smarter than us. We lean towards the camp that feels there is something distinct about the human experience that can never be imitated. 

We feel that our job — as writers and marketers — is to help our clients forge real, meaningful relationships with their prospects and customers. And for now, A.I. writing assistants can't do that.

Every year thousands of brands, retailers, startups and reporters in the ecommerce, marketing, and innovations industries convene in Las Vegas, NV for Shoptalk to discuss the evolving retail ecosystem and innovative solutions for addressing key challenges. 

Generative A.I. is transforming marketing and PR worldwide. The use of A.I. supports marketing and PR professionals in generating content quickly and easily, leading to improved efficiency, customization and creativity. eBay's CMO says they use it to support personalized subject lines for emails and for banner ad copy, with plans to expand.

The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco is a beacon for the latest trends and shifts in the industry and, as always, a hotbed for deals. J&J’s acquisition of Ambrx Biopharma and GSK’s purchase of Ailios Bio were two of many making headlines at the show.   

Neil Patel, a renowned digital marketer and entrepreneur, emphasizes that roughly 75% of web surfers rarely browse beyond the first page, highlighting the importance of high search rankings. With many websites vying for these top-tier spots, a key question arises: How can you optimize your content for first-page rankings? This is where recent advancements in artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology come in.

Recently, we published a blog post explaining why we won't be using generative AI writing assistants any time soon. The bottom line is that we just don't feel that the quality of the writing they produce is anywhere close to what our clients expect and what we know will help them achieve their goals. 

Since the launch of ChatGPT a year ago, A.I. has transformed the banking industry and will continue to do so in 2024. The technology radically altered the way employees do their jobs and allowed them to rethink age-old industry challenges.

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As the dust settles on Generative AI’s record-breaking debut, the lawsuits and investigations have begun, the academic studies are trickling in and many PR professionals are still asking themselves: Should I be using AI to get my work done? 

 

Congressman Maxwell Frost is 26 years old. During a speech to fellow Democrats, he called a popular political event held in South Carolina “the Coachella of the South.” As he recalled to MSNBC host Jen Psaki recently, half of the crowd had no idea what he was talking about.