• FIR #357: A Status Report on AI in PR

Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) has been widely available publicly for less than a year, but the public relations industry has moved quickly to assess its potential and begin the process of implementation. How is it going so far? A brief from the PR Academy looks at the state of AGI in PR. Also in this monthly long-form episode:

• Acast has risen to the top of the business podcasting services heap
• Despite political pressure, marketers continue to focus on diversity
• Gen Z journalists are not like their predecessors. What are their values and priorities?
• Deepfakes have been a concern for years. Deepfake scams have finally arrived.
• Website owners are looking for ways to block AI web crawlers from vacuuming up their content.

In his tech report, Dan York looks at Mastodon 4.2 and the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.

Links from this episode

• Briefing: AI in PR - PR Academy
• CIPR’s AI reports
• Acast Subsidiary Brand Podchaser Launches AI-powered Predictive Language Modeling
• Slip.Stream inks music licensing partnership with podcast firm Acast - Music Business Worldwide
• Warner Bros. Discovery Inks Podcast Deal With Acast for Multiple Brands (Exclusive)
• Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
• Marketers Maintain Focus on Diversity Despite Outside Pressures
• The Legal Assault on Corporate Diversity Efforts Has Begun
• HP Demands Ad Agencies Diversify Their Workforces
• General Motors Vows to Send More Advertising Dollars to Black-Owned Media Companies
• EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation
• ‘Challenge Accepted’: Mehdi Hasan Checks Elon Musk’s Wild Claim About Hate Speech
• What PR pros should know about the newest generation of journalists - PR Daily
• Deepfake scams have arrived: Fake videos spread on Facebook, TikTok and Youtube
• FIR #133: Narcissism, Consumerism, and Activism - FIR Podcast Network (our first deepfake reference)
• Why publishers are questioning the effectiveness of blocking AI web crawlers
• Medium hopes to stop AI bot crawlers from scraping content

Links from Dan York’s report

• Mastodon 4.2: A New Search Experience and More!
• Mastodon’s latest release makes the open source Twitter alternative easier to use
• Mastodon 4.2.0 – Post Toots Every Day
• Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family
• WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon
• How to Connect Your WordPress Blog to the Fediverse
• How to Follow WordPress Blogs From Anywhere on the Fediverse

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 2 (but it will be the September episode).

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat each Thursday at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request the credentials in our Facebook group, or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.