March 30, 2026

AI in PR: How to raise standards instead of lowering them

How AI's use in comms is disrupting the industry, and what PR's can do to use AI professionally and responsibly, and without burning bridges.

What even is AI slop?

“AI slop” was coined in the 2020s to describe poor-quality AI-generated images and videos – one that springs to mind is the AI clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Merriam-Webster crowned “slop” word of the year in 2025, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

In PR and comms, AI slop shows up as:

A generic, simple press release that doesn’t actually have any news in it
Thought leadership articles that say a whole lot of nothing – no evidence, no original claims, no point of view
A mass mailer pitch that lands in the inbox of a journalist whose beat is the opposite of the topic

Why AI slop is a problem (beyond the obvious)

For journalists

They’re already drowning in low-value, irrelevant, or simply nonsensical releases every day that they need to sift through. AI slop further clogs their inboxes, damages trust, and makes it harder for the real, authentic stories to cut through.

Mary Downer, Money Reporter at The Times, told me: “With AI being so prevalent, we question whether releases we receive have been AI-generated on an almost daily basis. Even if it’s just the text, when I think something has been created by AI, it undermines my trust in the entire release.

“This is particularly an issue for releases that offer case studies or statistics. News organisations everywhere are on high alert against fake or fraudulent case studies, so once that trust is undermined, the entire release or campaign is undermined too.”

For clients

If an obviously AI-generated subject line stops a journalist from even opening your email, that’s wasted budget and a missed opportunity. Worse, it chips away at the brand you’re supposed to be building.

Ben Rowe, our Senior Media Relations Consultant, says, “While content and soundbites can be drafted in mere seconds using AI, there is a significant risk that an already competitive PR landscape will become even more homogenous with widespread AI usage.

“AI can be really helpful when it comes to refining content, strengthening points and ensuring a consistent tone of voice, but relying on it to churn out content from scratch is likely to only add noise rather than provide nuanced, on-brand and genuinely interesting perspectives.”

For the profession

AI itself isn’t the problem; it’s how we use it. Saying “everyone’s using AI” doesn’t excuse poor standards. Bad AI use won’t only hurt your pitch, but everyone else who’s trying to land a story, too.

Basically, don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

What AI is good for in PR

AI is most effective and useful in support tasks:

Transcribing meetings and extracting key takeaways
Analysing huge data sets
Summarising long research documents
Building outlines for a report (NOT a first draft)
Narrowing a list of ideas and giving alternative angles to explore

These tasks that once took hours now take minutes, leaving more time for creative ideation and strategic thinking.

When humans should be involved

AI in comms is most effective when it supports, not replaces, human expertise.

Strategy and storytelling

Our brains do something AI still can’t: We feel things. We read a room. We bring additional context, making stories inherently personal and compelling to journalists.

Trials, challenges, elation, success, failures, trying again. They’re all human emotions that resonate, and we like reading about it. Some of the best PR work goes beyond stats to convey feelings, stakes, and impact. Tuning into this is crucial.

Judgment and context

AI can’t react to the most up-to-date data and stories unless you spoon-feed it with a detailed brief and plenty of context, at which point you could have drafted some comments of your own. AI may be able to plan a simple strategy with minimal prompting, but it can’t anticipate clients’ desires or ideate creative, original approaches the way our brains can.

Lived experience

AI can produce something that looks like a story, but it can’t replace lived experience. People are still the most powerful content asset we have. A client’s story – told with honesty and vulnerability – will always outperform something made up by AI. Great content comes from real conversations, not prompts.

How to stop the slop

1. Human-first, human-last

Every piece of AI-generated content should start with a human brief and end with a human review. If you wouldn’t put your name on it, don’t send it.

2. Raise your standards

Don’t lower your standards because AI makes it easy to produce more. Raise your standards because AI frees up more of your time to make things better. Studies show AI may erode our critical thinking. Don’t let that happen to you.

Use AI to handle the tedious bits, so you can spend more time thinking strategically, crafting compelling narratives, and making judgment calls that only humans can make.

3. Train your team

Learn how to prompt AI, experiment and train your teams.

At Definition, we have our own proprietary tool, Definition AI, that combines the best AI tools into a single platform while maintaining the privacy of the data and information we put into it. One thing I love about it is the collaboration feature.

When someone creates a useful prompt, they can invite team members to view the flow (the AI chat) and experiment with it. Multiple people can work in the same flow simultaneously – collaborating in real time, producing and editing content together. By sharing prompts and flows across teams, we’re able to minimise “slop” and speed up our processes.

Don’t use AI to:

Fabricate quotes or case studies
Replace an interview or first-hand reporting
“Autopilot” email pitching or mass content production without review

AI is a powerful ally, but it’s not a shortcut for quality and authenticity. That’s why the agencies that thrive will be those that use AI to amplify stories and human expertise, not replace them.