✅ Monday briefing: GCS plan, death of PR degrees, AI tutor, AI jobs, Amazon AI, AI literacy, Project Magi, ad ban, Substack Notes, Facebook news, and more...
Industry, artificial intelligence, governance, social media and tools
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom, and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join.
Industry
🗒 GCS PLAN: The UK Government Communication Plan for 2023/2024 builds on the Prime Minister's priorities and the Government Communication Service strategy focused on partners, technology and skills. It sets out a plan for an Innovation Hub which will lead on identifying, testing and scaling the most promising technologies for public engagement, including greater AI. Spotted Louise Gibson.
🎓 DEATH OF PR DEGREES: Public relations degrees are facing extinction in the UK. In 20 years, single honours degree courses have fallen from 22 to two (London College of Communication and Ulster University). Employers report the need for a broad skill set. The subject is being integrated into other degrees and developing at a postgraduate level. Source Richard Bailey.
Artificial intelligence
🧑🏫️ AI TUTOR: A case study shows how 30 minutes spent using web-based AI tools can unlock knowledge and accelerate learning and development. It explores sustainable garden design by Piet Oudolf and asks what it can tell us about system design. It’s a good innovation model to apply to any topic. Source Antony Mayfield.
🧑💻️ AI JOBS: Blue Focus plans to replace design and copywriters with AI. AI's generative and reductive capabilities can potentially remove entry-level roles in the creative and media industries. Meanwhile, Insider has given its reporters the green light to use OpenAI's ChatGPT. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.
🌐 AMAZON AI: AWS has entered the AI services market with a series of language models including its own model called Titan that will summarise and translate text inputs. Amazon is making it available as a platform for developers to build their own applications. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
✍️ AI LITERACY: ChatGPT has pushed AI into public discourse after more than a decade. It has forced organisations, notably educators, to take a proactive approach to AI. It has demonstrable potential for generation and reductive applications, while its flaws allow discussion about bias and information. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🔍 PROJECT MAGI: AI is set to have a radical impact on search. Samsung is considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices. It has led to Google building an all-new search engine powered by AI, according to The New York Times. Spotted Sarah Waddington CBE.
Governance
🚫 AD BAN: The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned two Facebook ads by airline Etihad for exaggerating environmental claims. The regulator broadened its remit to include environmental claims made in advertising in September 2021. Spotted Slavina Dimitrova.
Social Media
📑 SUBSTACK NOTES: Substack Notes provides a centralised feed for writers and readers to post, like, reply, and restack. It's slower and less dynamic than Twitter. That didn’t stop Twitter from blocking Substack links on the platform after Notes launched. The move has since been reversed. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
🗞 FACEBOOK NEWS: Facebook and Google hollowed out the news business by providing a more effective advertising market. The promise of improved reach for media was short-lived. News now makes up less than three per cent of content on Facebook, according to Nielman. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🧑⚖️ GOOGLE LAWSUIT: A new legal case alleges that Google has abused its dominance in display advertising since 2014. The case brought by Charles Arthur at The Guardian is seeking £3.4 billion in damages for all UK publishers. Ofcom director Claudio Pollack filed a similar lawsuit, seeking up to £13.6bn in damages, in November 2022. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🐦 TWITTER COUNTDOWN: In the absence of a significant upturn in advertising or subscription revenue, employment lawsuits and FTC fines are two events that could trigger Twitter's bankruptcy. There's a third issue related to the debt repayment from Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. The company is likely to go bankrupt with a bang, not a whimper. Spotted David Edmundson-Bird.
Tools
📷 STOCK SHOT ERRORS: An experiment using Shutterstock AI Image Generator and Bing AI Image Generator to create an image of a fundraising cheque presentation found that neither met the mark. Both tools generated unacceptable errors in the facial appearance however, the potential for improvement to the learning models is evident. Source Alan Morrison.
🤦 TOOL LEAK: Samsung workers have unwittingly leaked source code whilst using ChatGPT to help them fix bugs. ChatGPT retains user input data to help develop its learning model. You have been warned. Spotted Adrienne Cohen.