American actress and model Marilyn Monroe died in 1962. Sixty-four years later, an AI-generated image of her is still capable of getting Pakistani defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif to reply on X. But that episode is not the subject of this piece. This piece is about how the government uses artificial intelligence (AI) to talk to the public. Brands, political parties, and news outlets in Pakistan are using it to say something. From what I can see, the government is mostly using it to decorate what it was going to say anyway.
We are not in the frontier AI race as a country. But we definitely are in the race to become its most agile consumers. Historically, developing countries always faced a massive resource gap. Today, when it comes to access, that gap is gone. People working out of Toba Tek Singh and Nawabshah now have access to the same world-class research assistant, strategist, and programmer which a technology executive sitting in Silicon Valley has.
But what are we doing with this access? If we look at the marketing and communications area, not much. Actually, we are doing a lot, as in quantity, but not quality.
You open any social platform today and see AI staring you in the face. There is hardly any social media post which is not polished with AI tools; sometimes it’s a simple image, sometimes a video, and most of the time the captions and descriptions are improved with AI.
Government departments and ministries are also using AI quietly, regularly, and normally in infographics, static images, and captions. They are not using it to capture attention; they are using it to show they also have access to ChatGPT, that their social media executive can also upload a press release and prompt it to transform it into an infographic. Yes, that’s it.
It looks like whatever image comes up on the first attempt is published on official social media channels. Why do I say first attempt? Because the first attempt almost always produces the most generic, cliched visual language when your prompt is a single line and lacks any depth or detail whatsoever.
A post about youth is published; every young person looks the same, not just same age or other demographics, but literally same. A post about investment will have an upward arrow and a Pakistan flag somewhere. Sometimes the Pakistan flag on the infographic has no white portion, or the comparison of persons shown has different features on both sides. There is no second thought, no art direction. In government communication efforts, AI has become a substitute for design rather than a tool for design.
This matters more for a government than it does for a brand. When a brand publishes a careless image, it hears about it from its customers and moves on. A government is the one that keeps asking people to verify before they share, to doubt what they see online and to trust official sources. That is hard to ask when the official source doesn’t always get the basics right in its own graphics.
To be fair, barring a few government departments, social media messaging was never great before AI either. Stock photos were used, the same template with a different headline each time. So, AI did not create the problem. It just made the weak version faster to produce, and easier to publish without anyone looking at it.
The effort that is missing on the official channels shows up on the unofficial ones, I would say. When you scroll through social media feeds, most of the AI content that supports the government narrative falls in one category, propaganda or simply political content. I’m not saying this is unique to Pakistan; every government around the world does this in one form or another. It will not stop, but this shouldn’t be the only thing AI is used for. A propaganda video might give easy reposts on X in the short term but will have little effect on the larger public narrative.
When you use AI to its full potential for communication, it can work. And we have seen that in the 2026 Iran-USA war. Explosive Media (Akhbar Enfejari), an Iranian outlet, gained global attention for producing AI-generated, Lego-styled short social media videos ridiculing the United States and its role in the conflict. These videos were shared and watched by millions.
I am not talking about what those videos said, only how they were made. They used AI to perfection. From what I can see, they had one consistent look and a clear idea in each video and it doesn’t look like anyone published the first thing the tool gave them. They also came out in the middle of a war, when the news was already full of it, and that helped a lot. A government organisation in its normal routine can’t count on that. The effort is the part anyone can copy.
We don’t need to produce Lego-styled AI videos. Pakistan is home to over 60 distinct languages. The least we can do with AI is translate dense government policies into simple language, in text and in audio, for people with low literacy living in far-flung areas of the country. Someone who speaks the language should check the output before it goes out.
India has already built something like this. BHASHINI, India’s national AI-powered language-translation platform, was launched in 2022. It handles voice-based services in 23 Indian languages, text translation in 36 Indian languages, and supports 35 international languages. It powers government websites, citizen services, public events, and even live speeches. It is a translation tool, not a communication campaign, and I am not saying Pakistan should copy it as it is. But it shows what a state can do when it decides that being understood is part of its job, not something the audience has to figure out on its own.
On access, the gap is closed. Anyone running an official account today has the same tools as everyone else. What separates one post from another now is whether someone looked at it a second time before it went out, whether it is a graphic or a translated notice, and that takes a few minutes and, I would guess, a person who is allowed to say this isn’t good enough. Until that person is on the desk, the next post about youth will have the same face in it again.
The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.
Source: brecorder
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