AI Revolutionizes Corporate Communications: Study Reveals Widespread Adoption in Press Releases

AI Finds its Niche: Writing Corporate Press Releases

If there is one place that AI seems to have found work, it's in corporate press offices. According to a new study published in the journal Patterns, which provides a comprehensive review of writing released in the post-ChatGPT era, corporate and governmental bodies appear to be regularly using AI tools to draft everything from press releases to job listings. The researchers pulled thousands of examples of texts from all over the web, including commonly used platforms for corporate news, such as Newswire, PRWeb, and PRNewswire. They found that since ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022, about one-in-four press releases were AI-generated, with even higher rates among releases related to science and technology. Jobs listings were also a bit of a hotbed for AI-written language. The researchers found that AI-assisted language cropped up in about 6 to 10 percent of job listings pulled from LinkedIn across the sample. Notably, smaller firms were more likely to use AI, peaking at closer to 15% of all total listings containing AI-crafted text. It's not just the corporate world that is using AI, of course. The research team also looked at English-language press releases published by the United Nations over the last couple of years and found that the organization has seemingly been utilizing AI to draft its content on a regular basis. They found that the percentage of text likely to be AI-generated has climbed from 3.1% in the first quarter of 2023 to 10.1% by the third quarter of 2023 and peaked around 13.7% by the same quarter of 2024. Interestingly, the researchers found the rate of AI usage may have already plateaued, rather than continuing to climb. For press releases, the figure peaked at 24.3% being likely AI-generated, in December 2023, but it has since stabilized at about a half-percent lower and hasn't shifted significantly since. Job listings, too, have shown signs of decline since reaching their peak, according to the researchers. At the UN, AI usage appears to be increasing, but the rate of growth has slowed considerably. Outside of the corporate world, AI adoption sits at similar levels. To get a feeling for how average people were using AI, the researchers collected more than 687,000 complaints made to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau between 2022 and 2024, and found about 18% were likely AI-assisted. But, interestingly, the researchers found that people who reside in areas with lower educational attainment were slightly more likely to use an AI writing tool. That is something of an inverse of most technology trends. The diffusion of innovations theory suggests that early adopters tend to be younger and more educated. But AI tools, particularly writing tools that are generally available for free, may be experiencing a slightly different adoption trajectory. "This democratization of access underscores the potentially transformative role LLMs could play in amplifying underserved voices. However, further study is needed to assess whether this increased adoption translates into more effective consumer outcomes," the researchers wrote.

One in Four Press Releases Now Written by AI, Study Shows

All of these publications witnessed an increase in AI usage by late 2023 Artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology has permeated through the layers of human society, and we continue to find its new and broader use cases with each passing day. A new study has now found that more than 25 percent of external corporate communication and press releases were either generated using AI chatbots or were heavily modified using them. In particular, the press releases in the technology and business categories witnessed the sharpest AI usage uptick. Apart from that, the study detected AI usage in job postings on LinkedIn and communication from the United Nations (UN). Study Finds Increased AI Usage in Press Releases According to a new study published in the journal Patterns, the adoption of AI-generated and AI-assisted writing in corporate communications increased significantly in early 2023, just a couple of months after the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The study analysed 5,37,413 corporate press releases and noted an upward spike in the usage of AI. It claimed that before the launch of ChatGPT, the percentage of AI-assisted content remained at the 2-3 percent mark, which is common for false positives. But after the launch of the OpenAI chatbot, the numbers quickly spiked. Newswire, for instance, jumped to 25 percent of AI-assisted content by the end of 2023. Similarly, PRWeb and PRNewswire reached a plateau at 15 percent. Additionally, the study noted that the categories "business and money" and "science and technology" witnessed the highest adoption of AI writing, with tech alone reaching nearly 17 percent by the fourth quarter of 2023. While the trend highlighted that businesses are readily adopting AI technology to improve the speed and cost of content creation, the usage of the tool can also lead to the information being presented in a less nuanced manner, making the company appear less credible, the study concluded. To determine whether a press release contains AI-generated content, the researchers used a distributional large language model (LLM) quantification framework. It measures the share of AI-generated content using a system where the frequency of each word appearing in the content is measured with a distribution graph of a typical AI-generated content on the same topic. This method also has some limitations. The study highlighted that the framework only focuses on widely available AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, meaning the usage of smaller models might escape its scrutiny. The biggest limitation is that the framework cannot reliably detect language that was generated by AI models, but then was heavily edited by humans or humanised using AI. Such content might also escape its purview.