In most ways I wish it was still 1999. We already had enough of the upsides of the technology that would come to define the following quarter-century, without it having taken over our lives. And you still got food (with wine!) as standard on flights unless you had booked with that upstart Stelios Haji-Ioannu (in which case you were basically going on holiday for the price of a pint, so happy days).

However, it is important to concede that Alpha PR couldn’t have been set up then, or at least not without a lot more capital and several clients already secured. Distributing a press release meant printing, photocopying, folding, addressing and franking envelopes on a semi-industrial scale – in short, it meant offices, equipment and staff.

Technology has, in many ways, been a great boon for small business. But now we all have this AI malarkey to contend with.

While I am aware that ChatGPT can probably trawl the web and spit out a well-sourced generic article on a specific subject, that doesn’t worry me particularly.

As a PR business, Alpha deals primarily in news. Unless I’m way behind the curve on this (I probably am…), the AI bots can’t yet actually tell the future and, for example, write a press release about something that nobody knows about.

Or, at least, it would involve prompting the system with so much specific information that you might as well just get on and write the press release yourself.

What actually worries me is what happens when publishers begin replacing journalists, and even editors, with AI. Already we are seeing a number of newspapers employing people with titles like “AI-assisted reporter”.

What, in the long run, will this mean for the PR/journalist dynamic?

The importance of relationships has always, I think, been overblown – a good story is a good story, and a dud is a dud. However, when dealing with human journalists, human PRs can apply a level of insight in terms not only of gaining attention, but phrasing a story in such a way that the journalist might be happy to pass it off as their own.

When AI takes over, however, I suspect PR will become more like SEO, with agencies competing to throw in key phrases that will game the bots and get their stories published, and a whole parallel industry growing up to train everyone on the latest developments and tactics.

And who, apart from those consultants, will be better off? Not clients, not readers – and certainly not journalists.