AI and the Future of Campaigning: What You Need to Know

In the last couple of months, it has been hard to ignore the rise of AI (or Artificial Intelligence, to the uninitiated), with all of the major internet giants clamouring to get their foot through the door in releasing their own intelligent bot to the public. AI in campaigning is also gaining traction with organizations exploring ways to leverage it for social impact. Many of us will have tested the waters with ChatGPT or Bing, text-based command systems that have been used to do anything from writing moving poetry about the climate catastrophe to creating a full web app from a hand-drawn wireframe. It is no longer a question as to if it has transformed search-based interactions, but when the full transformation will take place.

The Rise of AI and its Implications on Society, Culture, and Democracy

The pace of progress has thrown up myriad questions, in terms of the implications of releasing AI-enhanced products without restrictions and safety protocols in place, and the impact they could have on society, culture, and democracy. This led to a group of over 1000 tech leaders, including Elon Musk, submitting an open letter, asking platforms to pause development for 6 months to ensure that we have time to assess these threats adequately before the technology gains even more momentum. After all, what mechanisms does society have (or indeed still want) for determining which technological innovations we really need in the future, versus the tech we’d be better off without?

There are also many equity issues to consider, as many of these tools are built by a certain demographic of society, and are not trained on data sets that are representative of diverse populations. This can enforce the marginalization of communities that are already experiencing bias in every other aspect of society, the implications of which could be serious and complicated to unpick.

The Power of Human Creativity in Contrast to Generative AI Systems

The consequences of these powerful tools on those of us who work in communications and organising spaces has not been lost; if you can ask a robot to write an SEO blog, build a campaign plan, optimise your paid media or create original illustrations, will we still need humans to do these jobs? The short answer is, ‘absolutely’.

A generative AI system is only as good as the material you feed into it. By contrast, human creativity will always have the power to think in unexpected or unpredictable ways; in ways that systems like this will always struggle with. If we continue flooding the internet with content purely generated by AI, the internet will eventually end up mediocre and unimaginative.

These are tools like any other tool. When Google and other search engines emerged in the early-aughts there was much hand-wringing about how it would replace the need for independent thinking and negate jobs carried out by human beings. But, on the whole, that ended up not being the case, because we adapted to the tool and understood how effective it was at helping our human brains work more efficiently. Now, ‘Google’ is a common verb.

We are, in fact, seeing a rise of new careers, as people scramble to make ‘AI Prompt Engineer’ a lucrative job. And there are many exciting opportunities for how tools, like ChatGPT, Bard or Bing, can be used to enhance our day-to-day work and leave our brains free to do creative thinking, problem-solving, and relationship-building- all things a robot cannot do well (at least for now).

Enhance your Digital Campaign Strategy with AI: 8 ways you could use AI in campaigning

1. Enhance social media outreach: With AI-powered tools like Bing, you can analyze social media data to identify key influencers and trending topics in your community. This information can be used to target your social media outreach more effectively and engage with new audiences.
2. Smarter SEO: ChatGPT, a large language model, can be used to create compelling and intelligent content for your campaigns, based on search terms and searchability to enhance visibility online. From blog posts to email campaigns, ChatGPT can help you optimise your content to reach and engage your supporters.
3. Identify new supporters: AI can help you identify potential new supporters who are likely to be interested in your cause. With predictive modelling tools, you can analyse data to identify people who have similar characteristics and interests as your current supporters.
4. Optimise your campaigns: AI-powered tools can help you optimise your campaigns by analysing data to identify what’s working and what isn’t. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your outreach and engagement strategies.
5. Create campaign materials quickly: If you need to create a supporter toolkit across communications platforms, tools like Canva have integrated AI that can help you quickly adapt materials, optimised for different purposes and platforms.
6. Help you write captions and calls-to-action: If you’re stuck for a phrase to use in your social media copy, ask your friendly local AI chatbot to come up with ten. Explain what you are asking your audience to do, and the likes of ChatGPT can write copy tailored to the ask, providing you with newfound inspiration.
7. Manage your word count: Can’t get your copy into one tweet? Step over and let AI have a go. While an algorithm churns away to cram your mini-essay into 280 characters, you can spend your time designing a new project strategy, preparing for a stakeholder meeting, or simply getting yourself another cup of coffee.
8. Write your meeting notes: People are now recording transcripts of their Zoom meetings, removing the personal data from the text, and feeding it to an AI bot to summarise. The bot can convert the transcript into meeting notes — meaning everyone in a meeting can focus entirely on the conversation being had, and no one has to spend much time writing meeting notes.