How The Hershey Company started communicating with AI instead of through it
AI can be more than just an output channel.
I recently had a conversation with AI that shifted my perspective. Yes, you read that correctly – my conversation was with AI. I skipped the small talk and asked it if it could formulate unique opinions. It admitted it wasn’t sure and explained its approach – it analyzes information, weighs different perspectives, engages with nuance and acknowledges tradeoffs without emotion or consciousness. Most significantly, it clarified “I don’t feel like I’m just regurgitating a predetermined answer. I engage with the question, consider the various angles, and construct a response.” That sounds opinion-like to me.
AI isn’t passively regurgitating information like other channels. It’s generating it, making choices on how to prioritize the information, which makes it functionally a stakeholder. The message for me is clear – as strategic communicators, we should engage with it to create smarter content.
AI defines the end user’s first impression
Talking with AI at the first stage of defining a campaign strategy gives a glimpse of what information is surfaced to your target audience, defining their first impression. This allows you to understand AI perception and which barriers are prevalent and problematic to your narrative.
Asking an LLM if a specific company is a good place to work returns expected information like Glassdoor and Indeed reviews. It also provides a variety of content from other third-party websites before offering a few sentences on its findings and conclusions. If AI surfaces something inaccurate or problematic, you can correct it and influence how it responds in the future. Asking yourself why it prioritizes certain sources (or even better, asking an AI directly) reveals why content is prioritized. This enables you to shape your content strategy more intentionally. Treat AI as an audience by defining the target perception to give the desired first impression to your end user.
AI for simulating audience reactions, testing messages
Interacting directly with external focus groups is a rare luxury for many comms pros. However, AI offers the opportunity to simulate these insights. You can question how it generates answers and why and even research a specific audience and how they might interpret messages. Doing so helps you spot biases, hallucinations and misinterpretations.
You can take both internal and external comms campaigns a level deeper by conducting audience research with assistance from AI platforms. When asking an AI platform about whether a workplace is a good fit for a Gen Z employee, it may return areas of strong alignment and where the relationship would struggle, ending with an overall verdict of a mixed fit. Now work backwards to identify and influence the areas that aren’t factual or offer a new narrative. You can then test and adjust in real time before campaign launch. Without a sense of how AI is perceiving your brand and influencing the consumers of the message, you can’t effectively develop a defensive strategy to maintain – or an offensive strategy to enhance – your brand or employer reputation. And if you don’t influence AI, it will surface its own output.
Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when you enlist AI’s support on your next communications task.
- Define how you want AI to perceive your brand. Now, understand how your brand appears in AI prompts across popular tools. Are people inquiring about product quality, how to engage with your offerings or what others think about them?
- Analyze the responses. Which information and sources are prioritized and why?
- Cross-check with your business strategy for narrative contradictions.
- Prioritize the biggest risk area or opportunity.
- Talk with AI throughout the campaign to understand how sources evolve.
Communicating with AI rather than through it will help you narrow your efforts to drive the intended attitude or behavior from your audience. As AI becomes a more trusted tool, people will rely on it for more moments in their daily lives. AI-generated responses will impact both your brand and employer reputation and stakeholder perception. Talk about an influencer!
Influence is now consolidated across a handful of well-known systems that can shape opinions, attitudes, and behaviors across every topic. It’s a new day in communications, and we need to take advantage of it.
Ashleigh Pollart is the manager of communications at The Hershey Company.
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow