Strategic Communication and AI

Public Relations with Intelligent User Interfaces

Simon Moore, Roland Hübscher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

This concise text provides an accessible introduction to artificial intelligence and intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) and how they are at the heart of a communication revolution for strategic communications and public relations.

IUIs are where users and technology meet – via computers, phones, robots, public displays, etc. They use AI and machine learning methods to control how those systems interact, exchange data, learn from, and develop relations with users. The authors explore research and developments that are already changing human/machine engagement in a wide range of areas from consumer goods, healthcare, and entertainment to community relations, crisis management, and activism. They also explore the implications for public relations of how technologies developing hyper-personalised persuasion could be used to make choices for us, navigating the controversial space between influence, nudging, and controlling.

This readable overview of the applications and implications of AI and IUIs will be welcomed by researchers, students, and practitioners in all areas of strategic communication, public relations, and communications studies.

1 Intelligent user interfaces (IUIs)

The next generation of digital communication

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111320-1

Reasons for this book

‘We believe that user interface design is poised for a radical change in the near future’, wrote the authors of a research paper published in 2000 (Boyd et al., 1990, p. 24). Over 20 years later, public relations (PR) still has much to discover about interfaces. This will soon change thanks to a combination of real-world events and, hopefully, closer study: PR is about to witness and work with the next generation of interfaces, intelligent user interfaces (IUIs or just ‘interfaces’ in this book).

People and electronic devices interact and communicate via a user interface through mouse or hand gestures, speech, smell, touch, or even the emotions we show with our faces and body. We are still mainly living in a world dominated by graphical user interfaces (GUIs) developed back in the 1960s by Doug Engelbart and then at Xerox PARC. But a new kind of interface has begun to go beyond this limiting direct-manipulation form of interaction. Using artificial intelligence (AI) methods, IUIs adapt to the user’s interests, recommend what to buy or listen to, sense the stress level in city traffic, or help cut through the enormous amount of, mostly useless, information we are bombarded with. How people interact and communicate with such IUIs is qualitatively different from interacting with GUIs. IUIs are especially useful because they allow the machine to interpret what the users mean and don’t just have to take them literally, as is the case now with the routine of click on this button or press that key. PR will need to adapt and take advantage of the enormous potential IUIs present.

From PR’s perspective, user interfaces are ‘where bits and people meet’ (Negroponte, 1996, p. 87; Jaquero et al., 2009, p. 260). They help machines like phones and other devices that are mobile, wearable, or fixed in place find out what people want or believe. They help us find out what organisations want or believe, working through an interface that appeals to one or more human senses. The coming generation of interfaces, deploying AI, will have advanced communication powers and for that reason will become essential to PR (also known as strategic communication, a term now being adopted by industry and scholarship).

Interfaces and PR already have several things in common. Like PR practitioners, in fact like most if not all of us, IUIs often treat data with some bias. Data and persuasion matter to IUIs as they do to PR which also goes where bits, people, and organisations meet. PR and IUIs can encourage two-way communication, create or adjudicate power relations, and shape action by shaping perceptions.

It’s been pointed out that ‘The economy of bits is driven in part by the constraints of the medium on which it is stored and through which it is delivered’ (Negroponte, 1996, p. 14). The economy of PR is constrained the same way, and like bits (the units of information in digital communications) PR is experiencing fewer limits; there are more ways for PR to deliver a message, invoke a feeling, and shape a decision. This book asks what sort of IUIs could work with PR, and the effect of that partnership on the organisation and the target audience.

To deliver a message effectively, organisations must encourage us to connect with a media platform, and to trust it. They want us to find its media platforms attractive, helpful, authoritative, powerful, perhaps addictive, or at least acceptable and trustworthy. All media platforms are interfaces, and the tale of our attraction to interfaces from cave walls to mobile phones is repeated with the IUI: its design and construction, its appeal to our senses and to our reason through our senses. Interfaces tell a story about the groups trying to speak to us.

Frustrated by incomplete or unsatisfying data, we might prefer messages that an IUI can express better than existing media. IUIs might build more satisfying relationships with us or destroy carefully built trust. Thanks to machine learning, an IUI may learn how to be our friend or pretend to be our friend in order to deceive us, and how to uncouple our interior world from conventions and standards held by those close to us, or alternatively how to reinforce those connections if it helps the organisation’s PR goals. Depending on what we think of the organisation using the IUI for PR, interfaces could liberate or isolate us from peer pressure or peer protection. The IUI may show us new ways to experience and welcome messages crafted by people we have never met and do not really know.

At a basic level, an IUI is as ‘invisible’ as PR can be. It could function almost unnoticed. Until it goes wrong, it might be quite unobtrusive when we talk with a customer relations associate or a government official, place an order, read an e-book, but two sides are still encountering one another through it. Unobtrusive or not, the outcome of that encounter may depend in part on the interface design, the subject it communicates, the existing relations between the two sides, and the urgency or importance of the interchange.

PR will be concerned with how a user will accept, like, or trust the IUI. It is possible that some IUIs will be capable of convincingly informal communication conventions, and use them to make an organisation more ‘likeable’. Building a personal relationship using planned communication is hardly a new process, but IUIs could intensify its impact. Communication between organisations and audiences already seems much more personal, thanks to our inability to resist the many and varied screens that fill modern life. The situation was foreshadowed in E.M. Forster’s dystopic novella The Machine Stops, written in 1909 and which still repays reading. Our book looks at this process again and asks why IUIs will be at the heart of another communication realignment between humans, machines, and organisations. Running throughout the book is the belief that PR must now understand IUIs in their own right, and not mistake them as design features of the technology they are attached to.

IUIs have some way to go as fully realised PR assets. In their current stage of development, they are already becoming a useful way for us to obtain goods and health or educational services, but only to a limited, volatile, and erratic extent with ideas, reputations, or opinions. In spite of that, IUIs are already influencing reputations as they channel the personalities of the device and of the organisation communicating through it, and manage the information exchange with human users. On top of that, IUIs already want us to learn things, or cooperate in practical tasks. PR will use them to persuade us to believe things about companies, products, governments at all levels and of all political stripes, about campaign groups, communities, global nonprofits, and other kinds of organisations.

IUIs are rapidly learning the arts of persuasion, and to nudge, to sympathise, to encourage, to scrutinise, to play. They exemplify a tendency described in 1964 by the Canadian scholar of communication Marshal McLuhan (1911–1980). By extending ourselves into electric media he wrote, in Understanding media: the extensions of man, ‘we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace’:

Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution.

(McLuhan & Gordon, 2013, Introduction)

Viewed as a machine with mechanical innards, IUIs are neither good nor bad and some of us will approach them cautiously, and only extend ourselves through IUIs because everyone else is doing it, leaving the sceptics with no choice. Paraphrasing a bank robber’s celebrated justification that banks are where the money is, IUIs will be where the information is, and we’ll have to go to them to get it.

Whatever our misgivings, however, McLuhan was surely right to say that ‘Any extension, whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex’ (McLuhan & Gordon, 2013, Introduction). We discover new media the same way an infant discovers its limbs, with the same wonder and curiosity, the same thrill at its new powers. IUIs, once PR discovers them, will arouse the same sense of excitement and novelty, and the urge to play and experiment.

This book asks why, how, and what kinds of IUIs might be harnessed by PR practitioners who will also have to deal with IUIs as the audience since interfaces listen to news or marketing information, and interpret and filter them. It believes with McLuhan that ‘the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour’ (Introduction). IUIs will be the latest test of our technological maturity, our ability to live with the tools we have created. The more we come to rely on them, the more IUIs will wield a power of their own, using it to extend themselves just as we use media to extend ourselves and escape the limits of our biology.

We try to look at IUIs through the eyes of someone interested in PR. We ask if IUIs – guided by PR’s needs – could ultimately make many choices for us, operating in the debatable space between persuasion, nudging, and commanding, partly by mastering communication skills once limited to human beings. What choices would interfaces make? Could McLuhan’s dictum ‘the media is the message’ eventually become ‘the media is the mind’?

What kinds of IUIs are there?

If history is any guide, IUIs used as media platforms will start as tools to help PR say what it largely would have said anyway. Slowly or quickly, IUIs will then become interpreters and then arbiters of content, choices, and identities because they will be the faces of organisations. Which interfaces in development today will bring us to this point? Difficult to say: perhaps the cousins of projects underway at the Future Interfaces Group (FIG) at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. All of them are essentially, as McLuhan prognosticated, extensions of a user’s nervous system, to the point of ‘Appropriating the human body as an interactive surface’, in the words of a FIG team investigating ‘on-skin touch interfaces’ (Xiao et al., 2018, p. 1). Appropriating previously mute objects is being investigated as well. ‘Direct’, another FIG interface, is a touch-tracking algorithm to turn any flat surface into ‘an ad-hoc, touch-sensitive display’ (Xiao et al., 2016, p. 1), by effectively measuring the user’s touch and (distance) to the surface.

The value of an algorithm like Direct to PR isn’t limited to the information swapped between audiences and organisations. It is the ability to make any surface interactive. ‘Direct’ and projects like it make a connection between human and medium that supplements or surpasses other connections between humans and organisations, and sometimes between humans. Touch-tracking algorithms like Direct might admit more organisations more closely into our lives by embedding them into whatever we, not they, decide is media: tables, walls, appliances. They are part of an oft-predicted future that foresees an Internet of things: interfaces everywhere and anywhere we want, creating a false impression that we’re communicating with an organisation on our terms, in our space, not seeing that we have turned our own space over to someone else’s interface.

In these senses, IUIs could smooth encounters between organisation and human. IUIs ideally want to understand what humans undertake or think, our whole environment for perceiving, deciding, and acting. It is possible that their curiosity may improve our ability to be intelligent and creative beings. A lot of research asks how IUIs can boost our creativity or help people with cognitive or physical challenges – perhaps by playing games or by more formal education – or in the title of an early paper act as ‘An expert system that volunteers advice’ (Shrager & Finin, 1982).

Words like ‘education’ and ‘intelligent’ must be refined to see what they mean for IUIs that could work for PR practitioners. This book thinks about the kind of intelligence IUIs need to be useful to PR, and asks what an IUI’s ability to educate and persuade means for PR, beyond enabling a straight two-way data exchange between the IUI and the human user – that adaptable, malleable, organic ‘U’ in a technological sandwich of ‘Intelligent’ and ‘Interface’.

The following chapters see IUIs the way PR will want to see them. IUIs must be capable of watching and touching, understanding and feeling, choosing and acting, helping and persuading, listening and learning, managing and controlling. IUIs could engage the human senses far more intensively than existing media. Perhaps in PR’s hands, they will have the same revolutionary spiritualised impact as the first cave paintings. Could they affect PR to the point of changing its assumptions about operational strategy and human nature, or must IUIs conform to the fundamental principles that have always guided PR?

What could IUIs do to PR?

Hyper-personalisation

It is not enough to reduce the implications of IUIs for PR to a description of its features plus a paragraph on ethical implications. It is in fact reckless to treat IUIs as the technical sum of their parts. The agents of persuasion affect us morally as well as materially, and perhaps biologically as well. What does the advent of...