Generative AI impoverishes your content and does not master the specific expectations of a press release so that it convinces journalists to talk about you
Using generative AI to write your press release without expert proofreading is a dead end. The journalist who receives hundreds of emails a day takes that as an insult.
It can very quickly detect that the press release is created by the AI without any knowledge on your part of its actual expected results. The serial superlatives, the text that resembles a sales brochure, the structure designed for marketing rather than information are all clues that move it to the next email. AFP (Agence France Presse) has even provided training for journalists to detect content created by AI.
What you thought was a saving of time will ultimately cost you dearly by making you lose all trust from the journalists who read you.
The AI press release, a false good idea
The press release is a very standardized document. The journalist is not a communicator but brings information to a given audience. It is therefore not the same way of writing as for marketing content.
An LLM (large language model or generative AI which predicts the most probable word after each word in a string) has been trained on a corpus available at a date T and therefore reproduces what it thinks is plausible from word to word. Since there are few public press releases, LLMs act like marketing documents.
Ask your favorite LLM to write a press release, and they will come up with terms to describe you as “major player in the sector”, “innovative solution”, “unprecedented results”. Typically the words that a journalist spends his days filtering because they provide no useful information for his audience.
And having tested it to see what it is, clearly, no LLM spontaneously respects the standards of the press release. The structure on which the document is based is either incomplete or buried in promotional content. And the more you send press releases that do not meet professional standards, the less likely you are to be included in the media. You are seriously tarnishing your image elsewhere, with these superlatives.
And by writing your press releases exclusively with AI without expert proofreading, you contribute to the impoverishment of information by only chewing over what has been seen and reviewed since these are probabilities. Don’t come and complain about the media in a few years by doing this,…
The true cost of a botched press release
And much more than an unreceived email, it is even a capital of trust that you are building with an editorial team.
Journalists will not send you a message to tell you that they have deleted your “release.” But you have undoubtedly been blacklisted and will no longer be able to try your luck for a future campaign or to make amends with a real press release.
Your reputation with a journalist is built send after send. A journalist who receives several relevant, well-targeted press releases, respectful of his editorial line, ends up identifying you as a reliable source. Eventually, he may come to you on his own to comment on a subject, for example. It is over time that the true value of press relations is created.
A botched AI release completely breaks this bond before it even has time to form.
The real cost of a bad submission is not the hours spent preparing it but all the future missed opportunities and all the work it will take to rebuild your image with a journalist who has, without telling you, left you out of his way.
A journalist works with you, not your AI
LLMs produce content in seconds. Your competitors send press releases to the chain, mass-generated, clean in appearance (but only in appearance), but empty of journalistic substance. The journalists see them arriving from afar.
In this context, your advantage lies in the quality and duration of your relationship with the journalists who matter to your sector. This relationship is an asset that AI doesn’t create for you, and that you can’t afford to burn with every botched submission.
Entrepreneurs who take the time to master the codes of press releases, and to respect the journalists to whom they are speaking, will stand out from the crowd.
Press release written by AI
