Artificial Intelligence in Corporate Communications: Areas of Application, Opportunities, Challenges and Ethical Guidelines

It arrived overnight: AI for everyone. After OpenAI presented its generative pre-trained transformers under the name GPT in November 2022, the first product called ChatGPT caused a worldwide sensation. Within just a few days, more than 100 million users were already using the program—the fastest growing platform of all time. Since then, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI for short) has reached all areas of life and work and has had a disruptive effect like nothing before. Those whose job it is to generate content were quickly called onto the scene: Communications experts in the media, press departments and agencies. And when a powerful version of the text-to-image generator DALL-E was released in April 2022 after ChatGPT, it quickly became clear that GenAI would be able to do much more than just create texts. While we are thinking about areas of application for the new AI CommTech in practice, classic role models of communication have been called into question overnight. In this chapter, the authors shed light on the opportunities and challenges of GenAI and also take time for ethical reflection on the use of AI solutions. As chance would have it, this revolution took place in the midst of a pandemic and in times of war and crisis, when the economic situation of many companies was extremely tense. As a result, the two topics of efficiency pressure/cost-cutting measures/dismissals on the one hand and AI/automation/CommTech on the other involuntarily became a pair in the public debate. From the outset, GenAI was positioned not only as a booster of creativity, but also as a booster of efficiency.