By Penjani Banda, MA

PRSA Nebraska’s Josh Planos, APR, on accuracy, accountability and the role communicators can play in guiding responsible AI use.

Every PR practitioner knows that ethics is integral to PR practice. And while the principles of ethical conduct have remained largely the same, the questions we face in applying them today look different.

When Josh Planos, APR, became PRSA Nebraska’s accreditation and ethics chair in 2023, conversations around ethics often centered on professional behavior, with questions about disclosure and conflicts of interest coming up more often.

“Today, those conversations are less about compliance and more about competency,” Josh says.  

What Has Changed?

AI has added new dimensions to ethical questions that PR professionals and the public are now having to consider.

“Three years ago, nobody was really asking whether press releases had human authors,” Josh says. As AI becomes a more routine part of PR work, that question is quietly fading into the background.

The way practitioners communicate about their use of AI has also shifted, and expectations around disclosure have equally changed.

“When people were first talking about AI, they were talking about disclosing every single time it’s used,” Josh recalls. “And now you just don’t see those disclosures anywhere.”

As accreditation and ethics chair, Josh views these shifts as a call for practitioners to be more deliberate about what they create, and to think more carefully about what they present as their own work.

A Stress Test for Ethics 

Advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty, and fairness: these six values form the backbone of PRSA’s Code of Ethics and guide professional behavior and ethical decision-making. Josh sees AI as a “stress test” for every value in this code.

For Josh, each value is being tested for how well it holds up now that AI is part of the everyday work of communication professionals. Honesty and expertise, for instance, take on new urgency when AI helps create a piece of work. Can practitioners present that work as their own without being forthcoming about AI’s role in creating it?  

“You could say that the times have changed, but I still believe that we should not be passing off somebody else's plagiarized work or expertise as our own,” Josh explains, “that’s something that impacts PR and marketing.”

Is There a Place for Ethical AI Use in PR?

Granted, AI has found its way into the routine work of practitioners. But can it have a place in public relations without compromising ethical practice? The answer may not be as simple as yes or no. 

There’s value in using AI chatbots to brainstorm ideas and test out a draft of something before it goes out. Josh sees these as some of the ways AI can genuinely support PR practitioners.

“I do like it as a way to build up things that you've started on your own,” he shares, “and if naturally you're drawn to your mode of thought, trying on the lens of somebody else has value.” AI can also take on some of the more time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis.

But its use comes with a word of caution. “I don't know that it really is great at deciphering what's true,” Josh warns.

Aside from accuracy issues, AI chatbots often fall short of providing objective feedback and can instead reinforce user bias. Josh describes this tendency as AI being an “optimistic machine” that fails to give an honest critique. He also sees a longer-term risk in leaning on it too heavily. “I think when you outsource creative thinking, that comes with consequences over time.”

Our Responsibility as Ethical Communicators

AI can produce information that’s inaccurate, misattributed or unreliable, and that’s a risk every user takes on. This places an even greater responsibility on communicators to exercise ethical judgment over the work they produce.

Josh has observed lately that questions about how AI-generated information is verified are coming up less often in conversations among practitioners. He also sees a tendency to treat mistakes as the tool’s responsibility rather than the responsibility of the person who used it.

“If I’m leaning on this tool, and I’m not spending the necessary time to verify its output, then I need to own that too,” Josh says. 

He worries that, in an “efficiency economy,” the pressure to get through more work could make it tempting for practitioners to absolve themselves of responsibility for AI output. The reality, however, is that communicators remain accountable for the information they share.

“If my name or my organization's name is on it, I recognize that I own every word regardless of who said it or who drafted it.”

How Communicators Can Help Shape Responsible AI Use.

Beyond individual decisions, using AI responsibly as a communicator means considering choices at the organizational level. Josh believes communicators have an important role to play in helping the organizations they represent establish clear policies and guardrails around AI use.

“For a long time, policy started with HR, IT or Legal. And that makes sense,” Josh explains, “but the policy doesn’t matter so much if it can’t be communicated to the workforce.”

He hopes communication professionals can take on a more active role in creating policy. “Questions about organizational reputation, organizational transparency, organizational disclosure, those are communications questions,” Josh shares, “and we are the practitioners who are trained to think about how decisions look from the outside.”

There’s no denying that AI’s role in public relations is growing, but that growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of ethical practice. As these tools become more familiar, practitioners will need to lean into the Code of Ethics to navigate the questions and situations they bring. The tools may change, but the responsibility to communicate with accuracy, honesty and sound judgment remains.

About Josh Planos

Josh Planos, APR, serves as PRSA Nebraska’s Accreditation and Ethics Chair and is currently the Vice President of Marketing Communications and Public Relations at the Better Business Bureau. Before joining the BBB, he served as Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing at Grand Island Public Schools from 2020 to 2021.

Josh is a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, among other publications.