Authenticity is more important than ever in a GenAI era, says Samsara’s Senior Comms Director

Samuel Hall is Senior Director of International Communications at connected operations powerhouse Samsara. With over 25 years of experience within brand, media, and content, he’s a true believer in the value that strategic communications can bring to any organisation. He charts the rapid rise of ChatGPT and GenAI and warns against an overreliance on the fledgling technology.

What was your first impression of ChatGPT when it first burst onto the scene?

You’ve just hit the nail on the head. It did just “burst onto the scene” — pretty much coming out of nowhere — and has quickly become the ‘new thing’. Looking at the figures, ChatGPT launched at the end of November 2022 and in just two months, reached 100m users. For comparison, it took TikTok nine months to reach that milestone and Instagram two-and-a-half years.

What did you make of the hype? What do you think of it now?

Anything hyped to this extent will always spike my interest. At the start, it was fun to play with and made all the more amusing thanks to quirky hallucinations.

But it didn’t take long for it to become a powerful tool. Like most people, the more I’ve learned — and the more adept I’ve become at prompting — the better the results. Today, it is incredibly useful to produce ‘first thoughts’ or consolidate large volumes of content at speed.

When I look at GenAI’s journey over the last two years, I can’t help but compare it with social media. While that may have started life as something fun, unstructured, and on the fringe, today it’s become a multi-billion-dollar industry that touches every corner of our lives. I have no doubt GenAI will make a similar impact — and in a fraction of the time.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about GenAI in the last two years — good, bad, and indifferent?

Blimey! There are so many ways to answer this.

OK, so, if I start with ‘good’, I would say one of the most useful things I’ve learned is to optimise prompts — and the RISEN framework is a great starting point.

The worst thing about ChatGPT — the ‘bad’ — is when it’s used poorly or in a basic way, which leads to low-value copy or outputs that are inauthentic. You can spot that rubbish a mile off.

And ‘indifferent’...? I am not sure anyone can be indifferent about AI these days. It's here and it’s permeating almost everything we do — social media, content creation, apps, workflows, chatbots, you name it.

GenAI is such an amazingly powerful technology and getting smarter every day. It’s essentially doing what tech has been doing in other areas for a long time — taking complex labour-intensive work and doing it in a fraction of the time. And in some cases, with an amazing degree of accuracy.

However, I still believe in the world of Communications. For me, augmented intelligence — as opposed to artificial intelligence — is where the great communicators will play.

Can you expand on that?

Of course. We now have some incredibly powerful tools and systems at our fingertips. If they’re used right, they can turbo-charge many areas of our existing roles — and open up some exciting new ones too.

But whether you are in B2B or B2C comms, I’m still a very strong believer in H2H — human-to-human. And that is where a communicator’s skills should always lie. It is very hard to replace.

After all, TV didn’t kill radio. And social media hasn’t killed authentic news — well, not yet! In much the same way — and despite all the early scaremongering — ChatGPT and other GenAI can not yet replace solid comms know-how and grounded experience.

How do you use GenAI within Samsara and how do you see it being used in the future?

I use it to summarise large amounts of text such as research documents. I also use it to generate meeting notes. I’ve always been a fan of the Otter transcription app and often I’ll use it and ChatGPT to pull through key themes from meetings. That way, we’re not wasting people’s time or money on writing up notes.

Also, it’s a good first-party data research tool — providing you acknowledge the data limitations. It’s a good place to start if ‘blank page’ syndrome starts to creep in.

Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

I’ve spoken a lot about what I like. But now it’s time to say what I dislike. My pet hate is when people think it’s a replacement for effort and strong authentic comms. I touched on that earlier when I said that ChatGPT and other GenAI can not replace grounded comms know-how and experience.

Most people can spot an AI-generated, cut-and-paste job a mile off. It sticks out like a sore thumb. As comms professionals, we know the amount of thought and effort that goes into creating effective messaging and an ‘authentic voice’. When you’ve crafted something like that, you must be careful not to undo all that great work simply by using lazy generative copy-and-paste.

My view is straightforward. ChatGPT and GenAI tools absolutely have a place in the kit bag of the successful communications professional. Yes, it will make you more efficient and allow you to scale. But this should never be done at the cost of authenticity. Forget the hype — that’s where our focus should be.