The U.K.’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) recently released AI Green Paper: Setting the Standard for Responsible AI, a document aimed at helping the PR profession navigate AI responsibly. It’s a solid read, and if you work in communications, it’s worth your time. But the thing that jumped out at me wasn’t a specific recommendation or a new framework. It was how consistently the paper circles back to one idea: trust.
Which makes sense. Because trust is not just one of the things we do in communications. It is the thing. It is the whole point. And if AI erodes it, then every efficiency gain, every clever chatbot, every time-saving workflow becomes irrelevant.
Trust is already fragile
The Green Paper cites a U.K. poll that found 44 per cent of adults trusted AI to tell the truth. That’s ahead of government (38 per cent) and social media influencers (24 per cent). But the numbers shift dramatically when you look at who was asked. Among Gen Z respondents, trust in AI sat at 65 per cent. Among Boomers, it dropped to 26 per cent. People with postgraduate degrees were nearly twice as likely to trust AI as those with secondary education.
Those gaps should matter to anyone in local government communications. Your audience isn’t a homogeneous group of early adopters. It’s a full cross-section of your community, and their comfort level with AI-generated content ranges from enthusiastic to deeply skeptical. If you’re using AI to draft public-facing materials and your audience doesn’t trust the source, you’ve got a problem no amount of prompt engineering will fix.
The paper’s core principles land well
The PRCA paper lays out a set of principles for responsible AI use, and they read like a trust-building checklist. Human oversight as the overarching principle. Transparency about when and how AI is used. Clear accountability, meaning a named human is responsible for AI-driven work. Accuracy, with verification processes that go beyond “the tool said so.” Privacy, accessibility, intellectual property, sustainability, and a commitment to education and understanding.
None of this is radical. Most of it would be familiar to anyone who has worked in public sector communications for any length of time. But the paper’s value is in naming these things clearly and connecting them directly to AI use. Because the temptation with AI is to skip the governance part and jump straight to the efficiency part. And that’s where trust starts to erode.
What this means for local government
Here in B.C., we don’t have the EU’s AI Act or a comprehensive federal AI law. Bill C-27, which would have introduced some AI governance provisions, died on the order paper. We have B.C.’s Digital Code of Practice and Quebec’s Law 25, but the regulatory landscape is still patchy. That makes professional self-governance even more important.
For municipal communicators, this is where our professional training and ethical instincts need to kick in. If you’re using AI to draft a news release, who is reviewing it for accuracy? If you’re using AI to summarize a council report, does the summary actually reflect what was said? If you’re using AI to respond to social media comments, does the response sound like your organization or like a robot trying to sound like your organization?
The PRCA paper makes a point I think about a lot: as AI becomes more capable, the human skills at the core of our profession become more important, not less. Strategic thinking, ethical judgment, cultural understanding, empathy, and accountability. These are the things that build trust. AI can’t do them.
Start small, stay honest
One of the more practical sections of the paper talks about how organizations are building AI competency. The advice from practitioners they interviewed was consistent: start with low-risk, high-impact tasks. Don’t chase every new tool. Build confidence through repetition, not novelty. And create safe spaces where staff can ask questions without feeling like they’re falling behind.
That resonates with what I see in the municipalities I work with. The teams that are doing well with AI aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest tools. They’re the ones that have clear guidelines, leadership support, and a culture where it’s OK to say “I tried this and it didn’t work.”
The paper also raises a concern I share: the risk of a two-tier industry where larger organizations can invest in secure AI environments, training, and governance frameworks while smaller teams are left to figure it out on their own. In local government, that gap is real. A city of 200,000 and a town of 3,000 face the same ethical expectations around AI use, but they have very different resources to meet them.
Five takeaways
1. Trust is the non-negotiable. Every AI decision in communications should start with the question: does this strengthen or weaken public trust?
2. Human oversight isn’t optional. AI is a tool, not a decision-maker. Someone with a name and a title needs to own the output.
3. Transparency matters, and it’s context-dependent. A social media post drafted with AI assistance may not need a disclaimer, but an AI-generated summary of a public hearing probably does. Use your judgment.
4. Start small and build from there. Reporting, drafting, and routine content are good places to begin. Leave the high-stakes, public-facing work to humans until your team has the confidence and the guardrails to do it well.
5. The regulatory landscape is still catching up. In the absence of clear legislation, professional ethics and organizational policies are your best protection. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what responsible AI use looks like. Define it for yourself.
The PRCA AI Green Paper is available on the PRCA website. It’s written for a U.K. audience, but the principles apply everywhere. If you work in communications, especially in the public sector, it’s worth reading.
Julie Rogers Consulting 
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