Is Artificial Intelligence a Crisis for Companies?

Crisis Counselors Must Assess and Prepare for AI’s Dangers and Opportunities     

11/21/23 – – The word “crisis” in Mandarin (wēijī) is written with two brush strokes. The first stands for danger, the other for opportunity. That’s an excellent way to think about artificial intelligence, especially if you’ve been following the disruption over the last few days within the AI industry.

Microsoft announced yesterday that they had hired Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, hours after he was unexpectedly fired from his CEO position. Altman, considered the driving force behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI technology, has described AI as, “the greatest leap forward of any of the technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” But he has also warned of the “existential threat to humanity” posed by the evolving technology.

In the wake of Altman’s firing, hundreds of OpenAI employees have threatened to resign. And there is concern that Microsoft, which has advanced the commercialization of generative AI far more aggressively than OpenAI, will take advantage of this turmoil to blow through ethical guardrails.

Silicon Valley, Wall Street and federal regulators are trying to sort things out, focusing on dangers and opportunities.

AI has been around for decades; in the background making everything we do with computers faster. But only within the last year or so has it started to communicate with us. That’s gotten the public’s attention and created new challenges for crisis communicators and counselors. 

Every advance in communication technology changes the contours of the battlefield of crisis prevention, preparedness and response — offering dangers and opportunities. In my lifetime, the most significant breakthroughs have been television, personal computers, the internet and smart phones. Living in the interconnected world of 2023, it’s hard to imagine how news was disseminated, people communicated with one another, and reputations were established and destroyed before the advent of the platforms and channels we take for granted.

Recently, I thought back to a chilly, rainy evening early in my career when as the most junior member of an account team at the PR firm Hill and Knowlton I was sent over to the offices of The New York Times to retrieve the first edition of the next day’s paper. Our client, in the throes of a crisis, was to be the subject of what we expected to be a very unflattering article.

My job was to get the first paper off the stack — the newsstand in front of the Times got the first delivery, literally hot off the presses, around 10:30 — run to a pay phone and read the article to my boss. Given the flickering light in the leaky phone booth, that was not an easy task.

Today, the hard-copy deadlines at the Times and every other legacy news outlet are meaningless. News is published and retrievable instantly by everybody online throughout the day. PR counselors are in constant communication with their clients. And I can’t remember the last time I saw a phone booth in New York.  

Technological advancement is a wonderful thing, right?

Not so fast.

While we have more sophisticated communication tools to track and respond to public criticism and negative media coverage, attacks on reputations, true or false, are seen by millions of people around the world in seconds.

If Altman is right about AI being both an “existential threat to humanity” and “the greatest leap forward of any of the technological revolutions we’ve had so far,” we all — not just crisis counselors — have to be ready for the dangers and the opportunities.

As a former high school English teacher, I’ve been fascinated by the range of approaches to AI in the classroom. Some schools are prohibiting the use of AI writing and research tools, while others are incorporating AI into their curriculum. Some PR firms are boasting about the press releases they write and distribute using AI, while others are promoting the human touch they offer to counter the flat, often inaccurate language and strategy generated with AI. Law firms are hustling to establish policies that make the most of AI assistance without minimizing the importance of human judgment.  

What are the dangers and opportunities of AI for your company?  Whether you speak Mandarin or not, that’s a discussion you should be having now.

Full disclosure: This blog post was written without the help of artificial intelligence. I kind of miss phone booths, I love the hard-copy edition of the Sunday New York Times, and my personal email account is with AOL!