In 2014, marketing strategist Mark Schaefer introduced the concept of “content shock” and predicted a turning point in which content supply would significantly exceed human capabilities.
Schafer’s predictions were very foresighted. In the decade since his blog post, content creation has skyrocketed, with Instagram uploads rising from 70 million daily in 2014 to 1.3 billion in 2024.
Currently, AI is accelerating this shift at an unprecedented pace, generating 34 million images every day (as of 2023) and flooding Google searches and social media feeds with machine-generated content. With tools like ChatGpt, Sora, and Midjourney, the costs and effort required to create content are rapidly approaching zero, making it more difficult for businesses to noticeably cut.
Content Shock warned about a world in which content production caused human attention. But we have moved beyond that into an era of “infinite content.”
Endless content forces us to rethink our strategy for attracting attention, encouraging meaningful engagement with our audience.
Prosper in an age of endless content
The era of endless content amplifies many of the challenges communication experts have dealt with over the years. Journalists are stretched thinly, audiences are trapped in filter bubbles, and misinformation spreads faster than fact.
But generation AI is part of the solution and offers opportunities for communications leaders to innovate. Rather than joining the noise, AI allows communicators to attract stakeholders in a smarter, more personalized way, allowing them to accurately communicate content that speaks directly to their needs and interests. Generation AI can help promote 1:1 dynamic interactions rather than all messaging of one size.
As communication evolves in this new era, there are several ways to leverage generation AI to provide greater effects and more personalized engagement.
Use AI tools to fine-tune them to improve effectiveness. Tools like ChatGpt and Copilot are powerful, but require improvements to produce high-quality output. You can greatly improve your results by using custom instructions, memory features, or customized custom gputs tailored to your specific use case. To be even more accurate, consider fine-tuning language models with knowledge bases, such as press releases, internal documents, and media archives. Standardize AI-generated content to match the brand’s voice and tone. AI models do not automatically understand the brand’s voice or the nuances of corporate style. Set up a structured prompt, define key phrases, and create brand-specific language guides for use in the Generate AI tool to match the output to your organization’s tone, style, and preferred terms. Establish human workflows to maintain creativity. Research into “Advanced Science” found that AI-assisted writers produced more engaging, creative and well-written content. To maximize the strengths of AI while maintaining originality, communicators need to establish a structured workflow that documents roles. For example, AI can be used for ideas, drafting, and refinement, while humans promote storytelling, emotional nuances, and differentiation. Strengthen media relations with AI-driven insights. Journalists cover more stories with fewer resources, making targeted, relevant pitches more important than ever. AI can analyse past reporting, identify reporting gaps, uncover emerging trends, and help communicators create data-driven stories that coordinate audience interests. A simple prompt is very helpful. For example, “Analyze the last 10 articles and identify general themes or gaps in coverage. Suggest three potential story angles that you think are relevant.” Personalize stakeholder messaging with AI-powered segmentation – AI enables more accurate audience messaging, allowing communicators to analyze stakeholder behavior, engagement patterns and sentiment in real time. Set up a recurring task on ChatGpt to analyse last week’s major developments and highlight risks, opportunities and concerns inherent to investors, media, employees and regulators. Use these insights to improve investor briefings, internal updates, communication strategies and ensure it is relevant to changing audience expectations. Use predictive AI to predict audience needs – AI-generated content should not be static. AI tools can track performance metrics, audience behavior, and content effectiveness to identify which resonate and which are not. CHATGPT’s O1 model is used to optimize messaging by analyzing engagement trends, emotional changes, and content effectiveness across different channels. “Analyze the performance of recent releases, blog posts, or social content) and identify key patterns of engagement, emotions, and audience response. What adjustments should be made to improve the impact?”
Infinite content is not just a barrier, it is a fundamental change in the creation, distribution and consumption of information. Communicators strategically embrace generative AI can go beyond mass messaging tactics to build stronger, more personalized connections with their audience.
Matt Collette is the founder of Sequencr Consulting, which helps PR teams use the generated AI.
