How to use AI better

At some point in the last year or so, many PR pitches started to sound like they were written by the same person. Same opening line structure, same vocabulary, same rhythm. The person in question, of course, isn’t a person at all.

Nobody serious is arguing you should avoid AI entirely. It’s useful for first drafts, for restructuring a rambling brief, for turning bullet points into something readable before your 8am coffee. But there’s a big difference between “useful tool” and “published pitch”, and when everything sounds the same, that’s when journalists stop reading.

Editors aren’t sitting with a checklist, hunting for em dashes. Most couldn’t care less about your choice of punctuation style. The problem is simpler and harder to fix: AI-generated content is generic, and generic doesn’t get attention. A pitch that opens with “In today’s fast-paced media landscape…” does not make a journalist think, “tell me more”. The same goes for quotes from executives that no human being would actually say out loud.

Beyond the vocabulary, there are structural tells. AI defaults to a very particular rhythm. Short declarative sentence. Followed by an ever-so-slightly longer one. Rhetorical question? Answer to said rhetorical question. And then there’s the infamous “not this, but that” format. It also tends to round off every paragraph with a tidy summary statement spelling everything out, undermining any edge the writing had (because we humans were taught to “show not tell”). Real people don’t write in perfect resolution – they have opinions, make slightly odd word choices and occasionally leave a thought partially unresolved because perhaps the sentence read better that way.

Personality is inherently imperfect. A pitch with a specific, slightly unexpected observation – even if it’s a minor one – will do more work than three paragraphs of polished nothing. If you genuinely find something interesting about the story you’re selling, then make sure you say so. If you have a view on why it matters right now, put it in the first line rather than burying it.

AI is good at structure, but it’s less good at having a point of view. So, use it for the former – organise the facts, check the flow, trim the length – and then go back in and add yourself. Add the observation that only someone who actually knows this client or this story could make. Take out the sanitised sentences that sound like they were written to please everyone (but are engaging no one), and replace them with something specific.

Generic doesn’t get coverage – but you do.