AI cheerleaders: Public relations, neoliberalism and artificial intelligence

Abstract

, the PRCA, a trade body for UK public relations, debated the following motion: "The workforce in public relations will considerably reduce as a result of Artificial Intelligence and automation". The lecture theatre was small, but full. The audience was invited to vote on the motion before the debate began: 9 for, 29 against. The proposing team used hard facts and figures to sound a warning over job losses. The opposing team cheered on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a bright future filled with opportunity. The audience voted again after the debate: but the numbers scarcely moved. As the audience filed out of the lecture theatre, a senior in-house practitioner confided in me that despite agreeing with the sober tone of the moot, he had still voted against it. I asked why. He replied that he felt a duty to be optimistic about the future of the public relations (PR) profession. A similar collective confidence drives much of the industry discourse about AI in Public Relations; in particular, the rose-tinted dream that AI will free-up PR practitioners to focus on strategic counsel, even if this means the loss of many junior and technical PR roles, once they are delegated to robots. PR's professional habitus: optimism and futurity PR's professional habitus is defined by a relentless focus on optimism and futurity (Bourne, 2017). This professional habitus renders PR indispensable to the corporate 169). Such reinvigorated neoliberal sensemaking has, in turn, given companies new motive to put PR on speed-dial. This paper combines scholarship on PR and neoliberalism (e.g. Roper, 2005; Surma and Demetrious, 2018), with recent interrogations of neoliberalism in the political economy (e.g. Davies, 2014; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017) to explore PR's latest efforts to legitimise neoliberal discourses. The discussion is further interwoven with recent communications and PR scholarship on AI and automation (e.g. Collister, 2016; Guzman, 2019; Moore, 2018; Noble, 2018) to consider how PR's own efforts to normalise AI into everyday life could, in turn, change the shape of everyday PR practice. PR on behalf of AI is understood here to be a form of discourse work (Pieczka 2013), encompassing public affairs and political communication by government ministries and departments, political lobbying, corporate communications by global technology firms, Business-to-Business communication by global management consultancies, as well as Business-to-Consumer communications by tech start-ups. As part of discourse work; PR, in its different forms, is expected to privilege certain voices over others in order to legitimise AI technologies. However, unlike some of the discourses PR has been called on to legitimise in the paste .g. free trade, financialisation, outsourcing or extractive technologies-naturalising Artificial Intelligence as a way of life has direct implications for society, for democracy, and for the future of public relations itself.

Conversational agents in online organization–stakeholder interactions: a state-of-the-art analysis and implications for further research

“…Yet, because they are becoming a common interface between stakeholders and organizations, it is necessary to reflect on the opportunities and threats that these technologies offer with respect to corporate communication goals, such as building mutual and beneficial relationships with stakeholders and publics (Grunig and Huang, 2000). After all, AI platform design is purposeful and exhibits biases that may erode human rights (Bourne, 2019).…”

The contingency of corporate political advocacy: Nike’s ‘dream crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick

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The secrecy−transparency dynamic: A sociological reframing of secrecy and transparency for public relations research

“…In PR scholarship there has been less direct interest in secrecy as a concept although there has been considerable attention to practices of obscuring information, limiting information release and shaping the form and tone of such information and how this relates, for instance, to shaping public(s) (Pieczka, 2019) or the potentially blurred boundaries between propaganda and PR (Lock and Ludolph, 2019). There have been analyses of how PR is implicated in ‘denying voice’ (Bourne, 2019), and in the use of ‘strategic silence’ (Dimitrov, 2017). Where secrecy is addressed directly (e.g.…”

“…Within public relations scholarship there has been interest in analysing PR's relationship to neoliberalism (e.g. Bourne, 2019;Cronin, 2018;Demetrious and Surma, 2019;Surma and Demetrious, 2018), and its place in the core institutions of neoliberal capitalism such as the financial industry (Bourne, 2017). As Demetrious and Surma argue, ….it is important to understand public relations as both a discursive mode (in terms of its characteristic and now-normalised promotional structures, vocabularies and styles) and as an institutional site (of occupational networks, peak bodies, professional associations, think tanks and educational sites) from which the discourse gains its authority, status and legitimacy.…”

“…Within PR scholarship, there has been interest in analysing PR’s relationship to neoliberalism (e.g. Bourne, 2019; Cronin, 2018; Demetrious and Surma, 2019; Surma and Demetrious, 2018), and its place in the core institutions of neoliberal capitalism such as the financial industry (Bourne, 2017). As Demetrious and Surma (2019) argue,.…”