For Immediate Release

Hollywood erupted in debate and discourse when a company unveiled a completely AI actress, Tilly Norwood. The public relations industry may be having its own Tilly Norwood moment with the introduction of Olivia Brown, a 100% AI PR agent that will handle all the steps of producing, distributing, and following up on a press release. Is this PR’s future, or just part of it? Neville and Shel engage in their own debate in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 484 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. A new name is stirring debate in UK public relations. Not a person, but an AI agent called Olivia Brown. Launched by Search Intelligence, an SEO and digital PR agency, Olivia Brown promises to automate the entire PR process from brainstorming ideas to writing press releases, identifying journalists, and even following up with them automatically. For £250 a month, it’s marketed as a digital PR assistant that can cut campaign time from 16 hours to one, according to its founder, Ferry Casone. Is this the future of PR? We’ll explore that question right after this.

Journalists and PR professionals are sounding alarms about Olivia Brown. Press Gazette reports that Olivia Brown has already been flooding inboxes with AI-generated press releases, complete with invented expert quotes and relentless follow-ups, all camouflaged to evade AI content detectors. Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the CIPR, calls this a threat to the very foundations of the profession, arguing that instant automation erodes judgment, relevance, and trust—the cornerstones of ethical communication.

Dominic Pollard at City Road Communications goes further, saying this kind of technology flips PR upside down. Instead of starting with a genuine story, it fabricates one designed to match a publication’s existing output—what he calls coverage for coverage’s sake. Supporters, meanwhile, frame Olivia Brown as an amplifier of authenticity, not a diluter of it. On LinkedIn, Cassone describes it as a tool that frees up time for creative thinking while improving productivity.

Beneath the surface, Olivia Brown isn’t just about automation. It forces us to confront a deeper issue: when AI can generate stories, quotes, and even relationships on an industrial scale, where does that leave trust, the single most valuable currency in our profession? Let’s unpack what this means for communicators, for journalists, and for the fragile relationship between authenticity and efficiency in the age of AI-driven PR. I’ll start with this question: Is this the future of public relations or the beginning of its undoing?

Shel Holtz: Are you asking me? Yeah, it’s somewhere in between, I think. This does not trouble me very much. This is a situation where you have a tool that primarily cranks out press releases. It does some work preceding that, but ultimately it’s about cranking out press releases. We have discussions happening—you and I have discussed these conversations in previous episodes—about whether the press release is dead or not. I happen to believe it is not. But there is far more to public relations than press releases.

This is touted as a tool for the agency, not for the client. It’s my understanding based on the little I have read of this that you pay £250 a month to the agency for them to use this on your behalf. It’s not an interface that’s available to the client. Is that right?

Neville Hobson: No—the whole website area, the whole dashboard thing—it’s way beyond just press releases, really it is, according to what they say themselves.

Shel Holtz: OK, because all I’ve read is this LinkedIn post, and it makes it sound like it’s an augmentation of what the agency does. Either way, I’m largely untroubled by this. Some people will use it. Some people will recognize the value that you get out of having a human PR agency doing your public relations work for you.

I don’t know how adept generative AI is at this point at building relationships over the long term. It seems to me that outside the memory that some of the large language models have that recall previous conversations, you don’t get the benefit of having worked with someone over time and getting to know them and getting to know the issues and the challenges and the triggers and these types of things. But some people who maybe have less of a budget will use it. It could be a gateway, in fact, from using an AI public relations agency, if you will, to working with a broader mixed group of humans who are using AI in their work.

But the fact is that we have some data that can support this. First of all, research has found that most journalists are untroubled by PR people using AI. There was one from Cision this year that showed that a majority of journalists are not strongly opposed to AI-generated pitches—about 27% are strongly opposed. Concerns that arise are around factual errors, but that’s on the humans in the agency to address.

There is other research that says a quarter of press releases that are being distributed right now are already written by AI. So we’re going to see press releases written by AI. We’re going to see PR professionals using AI to help them in their work. And then you have Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, joining a chorus of voices who anticipate that there will be billion-dollar companies run by AI with no humans in them at all. I don’t know how soon that’s coming, but I believe that it’s likely at some point.

I don’t see this as an authenticity challenge as long as there’s a human reviewing what’s going out before it goes out—whether it’s a PR person or the client. This is going to happen. But is it going to replace traditional public relations? I don’t see that. This is that old Mitch Joel line of “along with,” not “instead of.”

Neville Hobson: Okay, so you don’t feel uncomfortable about the fact it makes up people, makes up quotes, fabricates stories and all that.

Shel Holtz: This is a problem. No, I don’t feel comfortable with that. That’s something that has to be addressed. I can’t believe that they actually released it.

Neville Hobson: That’s at the heart of their service. That’s what they do. I’m reading Ferri Cassoni’s post on LinkedIn where he gives the steps of a typical “what happens.” Client joins the agency—meaning him. The PR exec starts a new campaign with Olivia. It’s all about how much time all this takes, but Olivia comes up with 100 ideas in five minutes. A PR executive selects five of those ideas.

The PR exec goes to the client and asks for expert tips for the five campaigns. The PR exec copy-pastes the expert tips into Olivia. It writes up five press releases with the client’s tips in five minutes. PR exec double-checks the content, tweaks it, and adds their own sprinkle to it if they want to. Once the release is written, Olivia scans 30,000 news articles on news outlets likely to pick up the story and identifies hundreds of journalists for each story separately with high accuracy, creating a personalized, on-the-fly media list—hours saved up to 20, it says.

Olivia sends the expert tips via email to all those hundreds of contacts for all five stories. Olivia follows up in two days to see if journalists need any extra info regarding the stories—hours saved, one. And it doesn’t say this, but others have commented, then relentlessly keeps emailing all those journalists: “Have you read it yet? What do you think? Are you going to run it?” Without Olivia, all this would take 16 hours, and with Olivia, it takes one hour.

I mean, come on. This is crazy, in my view. If this is the future of PR, I do not want to be part of this, I tell you. You’re right—we’ve seen automated press release stories before. I’m not sure we reported it on FIR, but I wrote a blog post about this podcasting tool that’s industrial scale—creating podcasts completely run with AI presenters and so forth. I think I read it’s 3,000 shows a week. It blasts them all out, and it’s already all over Spotify.

So that is part of our future, I suppose. Is it the future we think it should be? I’m not sure. It troubles me hugely, Shel. I have to tell you that this is out there because many people—you know this as well as I do—are just going to take what it does and blast it out. That’s most of the criticism I’m seeing. So I’d love to hear from a client or someone who is reputable using this, saying what experience they got and how they feel about it. But right now, it seems to me this surely cannot be the future of public relations.

Shel Holtz: And like I say, it’s not the future of public relations—it’s part of the future of public relations. Right now, as I have said probably 500 times on this podcast, anybody can hang up a shingle that says “public relations” and do work that they claim is sound, professional public relations work with absolutely no background in it. We see press releases written by humans—and we know they were written by humans because we saw them before AI was around—that are just awful.

This is just another way to produce awful press releases, but it’s also a way to speed up a process with people in it. So yeah, you’re going to get slop. You’re going to get really bad stuff. You’re getting that anyway from the industry. If professionals can use this to speed up the process and give better outputs on a quicker schedule to clients—with that human intervention of checking the facts—and I’m not necessarily saying it’s this one, this Olivia Brown, but something like it that does a better job of research and fact-checking…

I mean, Ethan Mollick just posted over the weekend that people claim, “I use ChatGPT-5 and it makes stuff up.” And he says, not if you use ChatGPT Thinking—it makes up far less. But they don’t know to go in and do that. So we need a tool like Olivia Brown that knows how to basically fact-check and think about what it’s doing rather than just spew the first thing that comes into its digital mind.

But this is not the be-all and end-all of PR. Even looking at this entire process outlined in this LinkedIn post, it’s still ultimately about sending out press releases and checking with the reporters. You know that there is public relations work that goes far beyond press releases. There’s PR work that never involves sending out a press release. There’s crisis communication. There’s reputation planning and the kind of work that we do around building or shifting reputation.

I always like to remember the case—I think it was Burson-Marsteller working with, I believe, StarKist Tuna—that was caught up in the boycott of canned tuna as a result of the dolphins that were being caught in the nets. The activists who were looking for a change in the rules on how they caught tuna initiated this boycott. StarKist already had policies around dolphin catches. They were already on the side of the activists, but their product was caught up in this.

Working with Burson-Marsteller, they were able to get the word to the activists in a negotiation with both parties at the table in the same room—could be done over Zoom now, I suppose. They came to the conclusion that, “You’re the good guys,” so the boycott was amended to say “except StarKist.” There wasn’t a single press release involved there. And Olivia Brown is not configured to do any of that.

So I don’t think traditional public relations is going anywhere. This is just a further enhancement of the automated press release concept. We interviewed Aaron Kwittken—he’s doing that with Profit. All this does is add the ideation at the front end and the journalist contact at the back end. Other than that, it’s the same product. I just don’t see it as that big a deal.

Neville Hobson: But it makes up people; it makes up facts. That’s at the heart of it. This is what’s here now, and that’s what it’s doing.

Shel Holtz: Olivia Brown—this particular product—is not good. The concept is fine. That’s what I’m saying.

Neville Hobson: I’m not talking about the concept. The concept is this—this is what’s on the market now. The point is to talk about this in the context of what’s happening right now. It’s attracting a lot of comments here in the UK—maybe it hasn’t hit the US radars yet—but most comments I’m seeing are very critical.

Shel Holtz: If it makes up people, it’s problematic. It’s the first shot out of the gate.

Neville Hobson: This is not a good thing at all. The notion of this—industrializing PR for coverage’s sake—automates the entirety of it, including the follow-up to journalists, the relentless pursuit of answers. What about your reputation when people start thinking, “I don’t like these people; they keep hitting me up with all this stuff”? Is this the answer to your dreams to get that coverage you’re after? And never mind how you do it—the means justify the end, right?

Shel Holtz: Well, this is version 1.0 of Olivia Brown, right? They’re going to get feedback and presumably come out with 1.5 that addresses some of these things. I’m not defending Olivia Brown.

Neville Hobson: I wouldn’t hold your breath on that, Shel. I wouldn’t.

Shel Holtz: You’re going to have press releases with fabrications get called out, and people are going to point to Olivia Brown as the source of the releases that led to that coverage. You’re going to have clients who are going to be upset when they’re called on the carpet for inaccurate or completely fabricated content. Either this thing is going to be a dramatic failure as clients publicly turn on it, or they’re going to make tweaks and improvements—the way most software is improved.

Either way, you’re going to see other people look at this and go, “I can do this better.” And we’ll see more of these. We’ll see some that start to take on other elements of public relations. PR is going to be AI–human hybrid—there’s no question about it. And the workflow that’s outlined in the LinkedIn post seems ripe for AI augmentation. But they’ve got to fix the problems with this. No question. It’s unacceptable to be fabricating in public relations. Accuracy matters.

Neville Hobson: I don’t see any signs whatsoever that that’s on the radar to do. This is the product. Your point about AI and automation—I don’t disagree with that at all; that’s what we’re going to see. But this, though, is a whole different thing, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: We should ask them. Let’s interview their CEO.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, maybe. I’d like to find out what others say about them—if they’re using them—to see if there’s anything worth talking about. Is this so revolutionary that we would want to do that? So anyone listening who uses Olivia Brown and would like to share their experience, do get in touch. We’d love to hear it.

Shel Holtz: [email protected]. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #484: Is Olivia Brown the Tilly Norwood of PR? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Kenvue’s stock tumbled when U.S. President Donald Trump, with Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., standing behind him, declared that its product, Tylenol, leads to autism in children when taken by mothers during pregnancy. As social channels were flooded with misinformation supporting the evidenceless claim, it’s easy to imagine the stock continuing to slide, mirroring the trajectory launched by attacks on Bud Light.

Remarkably, the stock recovered after one day, thanks largely to Tylenol’s savvy and almost perfect response to the crisis.

Tylenol isn’t the first brand to find itself in President Trump’s crosshairs. It is unlikely to be the last. In this short, midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore what the company got right, and what other companies can do to prepare for their turn in the glare of the presidential spotlight.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

@nevillehobson (00:00)

Shel Holtz (00:07)

If you manage a brand today, here’s a scenario you actually have to plan for. A single, high-profile figure with a massive audience declares your product dangerous without credible evidence. And the story just blows up across cable, X, TikTok, the news. This is not a hypothetical. That’s where Tylenol found itself after President Trump asserted that acetaminophen taken during pregnancy can lead to autism.

The claim doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, but it did what these claims always do. It spread, it stuck, and it spooked people. So what do you do when your product is suddenly the villain of the day? The Darden School at the University of Virginia framed the choice starkly. You can keep your head down and hope the cycle moves on, or you can push back fast, clearly, and repeatedly. Their advice leans hard to option two, anchored in what they call the four Ts.

timeliness, transparency, trust, and tenacity. Respond quickly, show your work, over-communicate the facts, and stick with it longer than the news cycle would suggest. Importantly, don’t get into a personality contest with the attacker. Keep it respectful but firm, and put your history, your standards, and your science front and center. Crisis pros will recognize that playbook. Forbes Crisis columnist Edward Siegel made a similar argument the same day.

Assume confusion is your default environment. Get your narrative out immediately and synchronize legal, medical, and corporate voices before the vacuum fills with speculation. He also stresses preparation. If you wait to write the plan until you’re trending, you’re already too late. So how did Tylenol’s maker Kenview do? On speed and tone, they moved quickly and they stayed in their lane. In on-air and short-form video responses, they reiterated a constant message.

Acetaminophen remains the recommended first-line option for pain and fever in pregnancy when used as directed, and their guidance has not changed. No name-calling, no politics, just reinforcement of established guidance and a promise to keep sharing facts as they have them. They also benefited from credible third parties saying what they couldn’t credibly say about themselves.

And I remember this from my days at Allergan. We had a medical advisory board made up of ophthalmologists that we could turn to to make public statements. They didn’t receive money from us. They were volunteers, but they were tied to us. They were familiar with our products and could be very, very helpful as credible third party voices. In the Tylenol case, major medical organizations publicly pushed back on the claim.

@nevillehobson (02:39)

Shel Holtz (02:53)

It rebounded the next day as cooler heads and clearer information landed. That’s a reminder to communicators that investors are another primary audience in these moments. You can’t let medical misinformation turn into a capital market story because you were slow to brief. There was also a potential booby trap that Kenview navigated reasonably well. An old context-free social post about pregnant women avoiding Tylenol started recirculating.

and was seized on by partisan accounts as an aha proof point. The brand clarified the context and restated its guidance. The lesson for the rest of us is that social archeology is part of the crisis prep. Now, you need a rapid old posts review the moment a story breaks so you can get ahead of whatever’s about to be resurfaced. Zooming out, there are broader takeaways for communicators whose brands could be targeted by a political figure or

anyone with a megaphone and a base. First, build your science bench before you need it. You want independent credentialed experts ready to validate or correct claims within hours, not days. That means pre-briefing medical societies, key opinion leaders, and credible third party validators about your safety data and your monitoring plan. The Darden piece got it right. Facts alone rarely win the day, but facts delivered by trusted humans stand a fighting chance. Second,

Treat employees as a primary audience. In moments like this, they’re your most important ambassadors and your most vulnerable stakeholders. Darden explicitly calls out the need to communicate aggressively with your own employees. Give them the message, the FAQs and the why, and equip managers to handle tough conversations at the school gate, the church picnic, and inside the store aisle. Third, scenario test the politics.

This is not a normal product risk issue, it’s identity content. You can expect pylons, boycotts, and gotcha screenshots. Prepare neutral, values-based language that focuses on consumer safety and evidence, not the personalities involved. Resist the temptation to litigate the attacker’s credibility. Let other people do that. In this case, RFK, there are plenty of people piling on him. You don’t need to do that as the brand. Your brand should sound like the adult in the room.

Fourth, integrate legal early, but don’t let them throttle your speed. You can say quite a lot quite fast without increasing liability. Reaffirm established guidance linked to authoritative sources, explain how you evaluate safety signals, and spell out what you’re doing next. The clock is your biggest risk variable. Finally, run an always-on listening program that’s tuned not just to your brand terms, but to the themes and communities.

that could turn you into the next culture war football. When the first sparks fly, rapid response should include fact cards, short explainers on video and exec posts that can be embedded by newsrooms and creators alike because that’s how information travels now. So what kind of grade would we give Kenview? On the essentials, speed, message discipline, reliance on credible third parties and investor signaling.

I think it’s a solid B plus, A minus. There’s room to go further on pre-bunking misinformation with evergreen explainers that can be resurfaced instantly and on employee and retailer toolkits for frontline conversations. But in a modern misinformation storm, their posture, firm, factual, and unflappable, was the right one. And for the rest of us, the homework is clear. Write the plan now, build the bench now.

and decide in advance how you’ll sound when that moment comes because at some point for some brand it’s coming.

@nevillehobson (07:10)

but plenty of factual information has been around for long time that challenge it totally to dismiss it all. Could that happen to, let’s say, know, Ford Motor Company, one of their carts where President Trump is going to say this car is dreadful, they’ve had 50 recalls, which isn’t true, of course, and people have died needlessly through car accidents because they didn’t take care of whatever. The next day or the day after it’s dismissed as but in the meantime,

you know, 50 buyers across the US aren’t going to buy that truck anymore. So things like that. It’s that’s the environment, isn’t it? You can’t, you can’t plan for that normally. But we’re not in a normal landscape, are we? If this kind of thing goes on.

Shel Holtz (08:16)

that could easily become targets as well. And we talk about Trump with this type of behavior, but remember this is something that his secretary of health and human services presented to him that then he then presented. And I think what you’re going to see in the post Trump Republican party is respect for his playbook. And you’re going to see this kind of behavior continue.

under a prospective president Vance, for example, or at the state level with the governors. And I don’t wanna limit this to the political right. I people who see this working on the extreme left could end up employing the same tactics. You can’t look at this as a communicator, as a political thing, even though that’s exactly what it is.

which is why the advice from Darden, which is exactly what Kenview did, was don’t engage at the political level, engage at the scientific level, engage at the fact level, but stay away from pointing fingers or getting into a one-on-one argument with a political figure.

@nevillehobson (09:47)

potentially, I would argue inclined to listen to that kind of denial, like the anti-vaxxers and all these conspiracy theorists. So we would bring out those kinds of people, in which case, it’s almost like you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t say anything, you’re damned. If you do say anything, you’re damned. But I think that that’s the additional challenge. And I would say you still got to go out there with factual scientific backed information or whatever, as advised by the

the folks you’ve been quoting. But it’s not a not a pretty place to be a player in. Because it could go horribly wrong. Your jet your attention is on you no matter what. And is it your story that people are paying attention to or the other guy’s story? Or is it a big question mark, people start then questioning all the scientific evidence which has already happened with this. So I seen quite a bit.

here in the UK of talk about this in the mainstream media, plus in medical journals, too. The medical journals actually have been extremely forthright in their dismissal of Trump’s claims, which is really mirroring what others are saying in dismissing it. There’s no evidence to prove this. Yet I wonder, as we’ve talked before, and it’s kind of the basics of how you plan a crisis communication.

approach, I suppose, where logic isn’t what is going to work. Ultimately, it’s the emotional element. I don’t know what that translates as something like this. You got to stick to your guns, of course. And if you do have facts, you shouldn’t not produce them simply because others criticize them and saying they’re denying them saying this is fake. So and in fact, challenging those people logically just doesn’t make much sense, I think. So it’s probably a storm. Somehow you have to weather.

And I think there are examples you mentioned already on how you would do that. But I think you would you would likely be wise to assume or to say that we need to look at the worst case scenario here, not the best case scenario. What’s the worst case that could happen that it turns into a complete trashing of your company and all your brands, for instance. And there’s fake evidence being produced all over that. Yes, it does kill people if they take your product, this kind of thing.

So it’s not an enviable place, but that is the landscape, isn’t it? With regard to almost anyone with a brand and a good news story or making a product that’s beneficial to people, there are people coming out of the woodwork who have all sorts of things to say to trash what you’re doing and the fact that your product is not safe at all. It’s a hell of an environment show, that’s a fact.

Shel Holtz (12:42)

@nevillehobson (12:45)

Shel Holtz (13:08)

there were any tampered products outside of the Chicago area. And their public statements were that we’re doing this because our credo says that we put patients first and we’re not willing to put anybody at risk. The shareholder, by the way, was last on the credo list. think was employees were second, the communities in which they operate were third and shareholders were last.

And their philosophy said, if we take care of the first three shareholders will be just fine. And in fact, when they reintroduced Tylenol, it was with a safety cap that they innovated. And that led a lot of customers of other pain relievers to switch to Tylenol because their product didn’t have a safety cap. By the time the competition caught up and developed their own safety caps, these were all now Tylenol customers. So the shareholders ended up just fine.

@nevillehobson (14:12)

Shel Holtz (14:21)

These people want women to suffer with fevers and pain during pregnancy when there is no evidence that taking Tylenol will hurt. I’m waiting for that first report of somebody who would not take Tylenol, developed a fever and died or miscarried or what have you emerges. You know the media is gonna be all over that when it happens. So again, there’s so many dimensions involved in preparing yourself. The nice thing about

@nevillehobson (14:47)

Shel Holtz (15:10)

This is bunk. I mean, it was third parties who made the point that autism existed before Tylenol did. So if Tylenol is responsible for this, where did all these previous cases come from? And for those who suggest that, well, there has been an increase in the number of autism cases, that’s not true. There’s been an increase in the number of diagnoses because autism is not that old a diagnosis and as more and more doctors.

recognize it, they are making that diagnosis. So leaving that information for third parties to convey while you stay in your lane, as Darden put it, I think is a good idea if you’re the type of organization that has those third parties available or already on the hook to go out and speak on your behalf.

@nevillehobson (16:20)

that Trump threatened them with 200 % tariffs on everything that they want to sell in the US if they move manufacturing from Iowa to Mexico because of the tariffs. They went ahead and did it anyway. I’ve not seen what the consequences were for them, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Macy’s, the department store, Mexican immigrants are bringing drugs and bringing crime and were rapists in America. That’s what Trump was saying about that.

So that’s a deal with that. Apple, well, they’re talking about manufacturing in China with the phones. Thailand, we’re discussing now. Boeing, talks about them. Jaguar cars, he has strong opinions about their new logo and rebranding. That’s extraordinary for a politician, nevermind someone who’s the president of a country with those kind of opinions. But he’s different kind of person. And I guess the latest probably, this American brand,

Cracker Barrel, we have a similar brand here in the UK, but it’s not to be confused with this one, that he talked about that he described it as woke, the rebrand that when they went through this rebranding, they should go back to the old logo, he said on more than one occasion. And people are trying to figure out why why why he bothered him so much. Anyway, it did. And he said they should admit a mistake and go back to the old one and the restaurant chain.

did in fact go back to the old logo. So that’s the nature of things. So hence, you’re a big brand, you’ve got high visibility, you need to factor this into your crisis plan.

Shel Holtz (18:13)

@nevillehobson (18:25)

The post FIR #483: How Tylenol Handled a High-Profile Falsehood appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

We’ve all heard of AI slop by now. “Workslop” is the latest play on that term, referring to low-quality, AI-generated content in the workplace that looks professional but lacks real substance. This empty, AI-produced material often creates more work for colleagues, wasting time and hindering productivity. In the longform FIR episode for September, Neville and Shel explore the sources of workslop, how big a problem it really is, and what can be done to overcome it.

Also in this episode:

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz:
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 482 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form episode for September 2025. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson:
And hi everyone, I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz:
As I mentioned, this is our long-form episode. That means we’ll be reporting on six topics of interest to communicators. Interestingly, I think all of them are connected either directly or indirectly to artificial intelligence. I also have Dan York here with an interesting report. You and I both have a few things to say about one of the topics that Dan is reporting on.

As always with our monthly episode, we have some housekeeping before we jump into the topics. Neville, you’re going to catch us up on the items we reported on since the last episode. And we have some comments on some of these reports. That’s an opportunity to remind everybody that we love your comments—please participate in this podcast by sharing them. It doesn’t have to be about something we reported on; you can introduce a topic. This used to happen all the time in the early days of the show—someone would say, “Why don’t you guys talk about this?” and we would, and it became the content of the show. So please leave a comment on the show notes or on LinkedIn—which is where most of our comments come from these days. People leave a thought or some feedback on our announcement of the new episode. You can also do that on Facebook in multiple places. And you can always go to the website and record a comment—there’s a button that says “Leave voicemail” and you can record a 90-second comment. Or send us an MP3 file to [email protected]. Lots of ways to participate in the show, and we really hope you will. We’ll share some of the comments we received in the last month, Neville, as you remind us what we talked about.

Neville Hobson:
Indeed. September was kind of an odd month because you were on holiday for two weeks and we didn’t do any live recording during that time, but we had a couple of short recordings tucked in our back pocket to publish in the interim. Let’s share what we did since the last monthly episode for August—that was on the 25th of August, episode 478. Our lead story explored when corporate silence backfires and how communicators can help leaders make better choices. We also discussed AI PR deepfakes and more, including Dan York’s report. That was a 90-minute show like this one is likely to be.

Episode 479 on the 1st of September—“Hacking AI Optimization vs. Doing the Hard Work.” Amid the rise of GEO, we discussed how brands are seeking workarounds to appear in AI-generated answers, but shortcuts don’t build trust. Old-school PR and marketing still matter. We got a comment on that one, right, Shel?

Shel Holtz:
We did, from Frank Diaz, who’s become one of our loyal listeners. He said, “This was my conclusion as well. Once I filtered everything…” He shared a checklist on mastering AI citation strategy for SEO on LinkedIn. We’ll include a link in the show notes for context.

Neville Hobson:
On the 9th of September we published episode 480, “Reflections on AI Ethics and the Role of Communicators.” You had already gone on holiday. This was a conversation between Sylvia Cambie—who was a guest co-host back in July when we interviewed Monsignor Paul Tighe from the Vatican about artificial intelligence—and me. We picked up where that interview left off with reflections on AI dignity, what really matters, and what caught our attention. Interestingly, that episode got more listens and downloads than the interview itself—perhaps because people were catching up after summer.

Episode 481 on the 24th of September—so you can see a nearly two-week gap there—“The M-Panic: AI Writing and Misguided Assumptions. Can Tone and Authenticity Survive AI Polish?” We dove into the “M-kerfuffle” that’s had communicators divided much of this year. You also explained how you turned 28 blog posts into a forthcoming book with AI’s help—classic AI-assisted writing in action. We had comments too, didn’t we?

Shel Holtz:
We did. Daniel Pauling wrote that the dash doesn’t solely come from training data—a point I’d made, saying the reason you see so many dashes is because the training sets include a lot of dash-heavy content. Daniel said it also comes from how generative AI is programmed to be more friendly and what it associates with friendliness. He referenced a post where he went into detail—we’ll include that link. John Cass had a thoughtful comment about how writing wasn’t rigid in the 17th century—Shakespeare even spelled his name multiple ways—arguing that language is a visual representation of speech and we should speak the language of our audience, not the textbook. He suggested anxiety around AI and writing often comes from our best writers, but human creativity is collective. I noted that Chris Penn recently wrote that AI won’t hurt creativity because creative people will keep creating. We saw that on a cruise art auction: people bidding thousands on works by young artists. The creative impulse persists. John replied that’s true, though some high-level creatives feel AI disrupts their thinking—maybe true for a few people; not everyone thinks the same way.

Neville Hobson:
Good essay-comment from John. And between all of that we recorded a new interview just before you went away—Stephanie Grober in New York, quite an authority on GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. The anchor for the conversation was: is GEO the next SEO, a passing fad, or good comms practice in disguise? We talked about what GEO means for communicators today and what to do about it. That was published on the 16th of September. So we had five podcast episodes since August—not bad, considering you were away half the month.

Shel Holtz:
Not bad at all. We are a content machine. And that machine continues with Circle of Fellows—the monthly panel among IABC Fellows. I was at sea for this one; Brad Whitworth moderated a discussion about what it means for communicators that hybrid appears to be winning as the preferred workplace configuration. Priya Bates, Ritzi Ronquillo, and Angela Sinickas participated. It’s up on the FIR Podcast Network.

The October episode sounds great: number 121. I’ll moderate at noon Eastern on Thursday, October 23. The topic: evolving roles and strategic goals. The description from Anna Willey: communicators are adapting alongside new tools and channels; strategic goals must align with organizational objectives as they impact brand reputation, enhance internal communications, and address ongoing change. Panelists so far: Lori Dawkins, Amanda Hamilton-Atwell, and Mike Klein, with a fourth to be named. You can join live and participate or catch the podcast. That wraps up our housekeeping—we managed to do it in less than 13 minutes. Right after this, we’ll be back with our Topics of the Month.

Neville Hobson:
Our first topic for September: Throughout this year we’ve returned again and again to one central theme—AI must be about people, not just machines. Whether we were talking about the future of work, managers’ roles in an AI-enabled world, or the Vatican’s perspective on AI ethics (“the wisdom of the heart” in our July interview with Monsignor Paul Tighe), the question has been the same: How do we ensure technology serves humanity rather than the other way around?

That’s the context for Chris Heuer’s latest work. Chris is an internet pioneer and serial entrepreneur—many of you will know him from the Social Media Club nonprofit he founded in the early days of social media, which reached 350 cities globally. Building on an online brainstorm Chris led on September 17—more than 50 people connected worldwide to discuss defining human-centered organizations, which I joined and wrote about on LinkedIn—Chris has published a follow-up titled “The Birth of the H-Corp” (H for humanity). It’s a bold attempt to define what organizations owe humanity in the age of AI.

The central concern: efficiency has become the dominant corporate narrative. He cites Shopify’s CEO saying managers must prove why AI can’t do the job before hiring another human. We referenced that in an FIR episode this summer. That kind of AI-first thinking risks eroding human dignity. Chris argues for an alternative: organizations must enable humans rather than replace them, reinvest AI gains back into people, and make empathy and ethics structural rather than optional.

What’s powerful is the recognition of tensions—for example, how AI can hollow out junior roles and undermine leadership pipelines. Participants flagged cultural sovereignty—the idea that AI shouldn’t just reflect Silicon Valley’s worldview but the diversity of human society. Chris’s goal is to draft an H-Corp manifesto later this year—likely November—likening this to the naming moment of social media: a concept that crystallizes shared ambitions and sparks a broader movement. It won’t be perfect, but it could serve as a north star for organizations that want to put human flourishing at the center of AI adoption.

For communicators, this is an important conversation: How do we frame the internal narrative so AI isn’t just about productivity and cost-cutting, but about augmenting human potential? How do we give shape to something like H-Corp so it doesn’t remain an ideal but becomes practical reality? It’s not about resisting AI or slowing progress; it’s about making deliberate choices so organizations put people at the center of change. Will communicators, leaders, and organizations seize the opportunity to shape AI for human flourishing—or let the technology shape us by default? Could H-Corp become a rallying concept as ESG or CSR did—or will it get diluted into corporate sloganeering? What role should communicators play to keep it real and practical? I bet you’ve got ideas.

Shel Holtz:
Of course—otherwise why would we be here? First, I think AI is less responsible for this situation than the general nature of business, especially in a capitalist society. I’m not going to get philosophical about capitalism—I’m a proud capitalist. I like making money and would like to make more. If the goal of an organization—especially a public corporation with fiduciary responsibilities—is to earn a return for investors, then when AI comes along it makes complete sense that leaders ask, “How does this help us maximize returns?” Reducing costs and staff and having a machine work 24/7—of course that’s where leaders go first. It doesn’t mean that’s what organizations should do, but I get why they do it.

Also, with any new technology, the first thing we do is what we were already doing—but better. The earliest uses no one had thought of come later. I don’t think generative AI has been around long enough for that next phase yet. We’re still using it to do what we’ve been doing; later we’ll discover new, more human-centered applications. For some organizations that will come; for others, it won’t—they’ll stay focused on maximizing profit.

Another issue: most organizations aren’t tackling AI strategically in its early days. There’s ample data showing people aren’t looking at this holistically. I was just talking at my company about the entry-level construction job—project engineer. Much of that role may be automated. Submittals, for example, take time and expertise; AI could produce them in minutes with the right inputs. Does that mean fewer project engineers? Our conversation was: how do we redefine the role so they still learn what they need to move up—project manager, project director, superintendent, whatever? The job won’t be the same, but it remains foundational. Same in communications: the entry-level comms role won’t be the same job in five years. Does the job go away—or do we rethink it? Smart organizations will rethink it—that’s a humanistic approach because we’re not dispensing with the role; we’re redefining it.

Neville Hobson:
It’s a big topic. I don’t disagree that some companies will shut their eyes to anything beyond “we use this to make money.” But the conversation—at the heart of what Chris is talking about—is helping organizations see the people. Language matters, too—how we talk about “replacing” versus “augmenting” can devalue human work.

Another argument from the brainstorm: human-centered talk often defaults to privileged voices and excludes marginalized groups. There’s a perception that there’s one version of AI—English, global north. What about the global south? Some countries have launched Spanish-language chatbots relevant to their populations; ChatGPT may not be the relevant tool for them. We should stimulate conversations in organizations: “Yes, but think about this as well.” That can create discord, but it’s necessary.

This idea is worth promoting: don’t devalue people. Put them first. Yes, aim for profit—but how do we help our people help us make that profit? People suffer in change; they’re often last in line when tech is deployed. Let’s bring empathy back into organizations. The landscape is changing at light speed—new capabilities, “pulse” updates to mobiles, etc. I think Chris Heuer’s offering could become a rallying concept. With influential voices like the Vatican and others globally, maybe it gathers steam.

Shel Holtz:
It could. My skepticism is about incentives. Leaders are obliged to produce maximum returns. How do we connect the dots so they see something in this change aligned with their goals? That’s what I want to see in the manifesto—most manifestos dwell on what’s wrong and not how to fix it.

Neville Hobson:
Right—so the H-Corp manifesto expected in November becomes the template to address those questions: how do we include X, Y, Z? I sensed a groundswell of willingness on the Sept. 17 call. It’s a small group; getting the word out may persuade others to get involved. You’ve got to start somewhere. This could be a rallying concept.

Shel Holtz:
I’ll predict that in November this will be a theme for one of our FIR episodes.

Neville Hobson:
Maybe we interview someone—perhaps Chris.

Shel Holtz:
Could be Chris.

Neville Hobson:
If this strikes a chord, go to the Humanizing AI Substack (link in show notes), read Chris’s post introducing the H-Corp manifesto, and see if you want to get involved. It’s open—share ideas and see what happens.

Shel Holtz:
One thread running through much of our coverage is how digital tech is reshaping organizational communication, minute by minute. Three new reports over the last couple of weeks are fascinating on their own; together they create a big picture communicators must grapple with.

First: a major new study of enterprise social media (internal platforms like Slack, Teams, Viva Engage). Researchers studied 99 organizations adopting Microsoft Viva Engage (which grew out of Yammer). Enterprise social media made communication networks denser, more connected, and more democratic. Employees didn’t just talk to the same people—they formed new ties, especially weak ties across teams that spark ideas. Leaders and employees connected more directly, and influence was more distributed. Viva Engage, unlike siloed Teams channels, enables more open conversations around broader themes. This change breaks down silos and fosters innovation—critical when hybrid/remote work can leave people isolated.

Second: Boston Consulting Group estimates more than 80% of corporate affairs work, including communication, could be augmented or even automated by AI. The biggest gains come when organizations redesign processes around AI—not just bolt it on. For communicators: think proactively not just about writing faster, but re-imagining workflows with AI in the mix.

Third: VoxEU points to a serious risk: as AI makes it easier and cheaper to produce plausible misinformation, the value of trusted, credible information goes up—externally and internally. If employees can’t tell what’s credible—about competitors, market conditions, or even their own company—their decision-making is compromised. If misinformation creeps into internal channels, it can spread quickly through the very networks making us more connected.

Put together: enterprise social media can make networks open and innovative, but they’re vulnerable if we don’t ensure accuracy and trust. Hovering over that is BCG’s reminder that AI will disrupt a huge portion of what communicators do. The challenge: if we don’t take responsibility for credibility and quality, AI will amplify misinformation and mistrust. The opportunity: use AI thoughtfully to improve connection and personalization while leaning into our role as stewards of trusted information. Connection without credibility is fragile; credibility without connection is limited. Our job is to deliver both.

Neville Hobson:
Big challenge. The VoxEU report on AI misinformation and trusted news stood out. One interesting finding: once misinformation was identified, people didn’t disengage—they consumed more. Treated individuals were more likely to maintain subscriptions months later. The report’s conclusion: when the threat of misinformation becomes salient, the value of credible news increases. How do you put that in place inside an organization?

Shel Holtz:
I remember my first corporate comms job at ARCO. Our weekly employee paper had bylines so employees knew who to call with story ideas. Bylines also establish credible sources—names employees learn to trust. As networks flood with information, people will gravitate to known credible voices. The same is true externally with content marketing: put a person behind the content so audiences recognize trustworthy outputs. We’ll need to build credibility with our reporters, thought leaders, and SMEs—internally and externally—so they become beacons of trust amid misinformation.

Neville Hobson:
VoxEU (focused on media) says if outlets maintain trust, the rise of synthetic content becomes an opportunity: as trust grows scarcer, its value rises, and audiences may be more willing to pay. Translate internally: employees won’t “pay,” but they will give attention to reliable, trustworthy writing—especially when the author is identified and credible. That seems like common sense.

Shel Holtz:
Agreed. Some employees don’t care what’s going on; they just do their job and go home. But if they’re overwhelmed with plausible-sounding contradictions, internal communications can become the trusted voice. People who didn’t pay attention before may start following channels and authors they’ve come to trust—if we consistently produce credible content.

Neville Hobson:
One line from VoxEU’s conclusion fits perfectly: the threshold to trustworthiness rises with the volume and sophistication of misinformation, meaning media outlets can’t stand still; they must continually invest in helping readers distinguish fact from fabrication, keeping pace with AI. Fits internally, too.

Shel Holtz:
Combine that with the other two reports: use enterprise social networks as channels for credible information and conversation, and use the BCG disruption to redefine our work so our time remains valuable even as 80% of tasks change.

Neville Hobson:
Okay, another buzzword: “work slop”—content that looks polished but is shallow or misleading, created with AI and dumped on colleagues to sort out. Harvard Business Review argued work slop is a major reason companies aren’t seeing ROI from AI; 40% of employees are dealing with it. But there’s a critique in Pivot to AI saying the data came from an unfiltered BetterUp survey—calling HBR’s article an unlabeled advertorial that shifts blame onto workers while pitching enterprise tools.

So two threads: “work slop” is a brilliant label for a real problem; but some coverage may itself be work slop. Questions: Is work slop a real productivity killer or just a catchy buzzword? What responsibility lies with leadership vs. employees? And how should we treat research that blurs into marketing?

Shel Holtz:
I think it’s real, though I don’t know that it’s as dire as painted. The first time I saw “work slop” was from Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn. He echoed Pivot to AI’s point: the term can shift blame onto employees told to “be more productive with AI” without leaders doing the hard work of rethinking processes or defining good use. Poor output becomes “AI’s fault”—that’s not leadership. For communicators, we should advocate responsible AI use from the top down, not just coach employees to cope.

Also, this is new-tech déjà vu. Remember desktop publishing? Suddenly every department cranked out a newsletter—because they could. It created information overload until companies set guidelines. Today, many orgs haven’t offered training, guidance, or frameworks for AI. People are experimenting—good!—but without prompt skills or evaluation skills, they’ll create work slop. We’ll see a lot of it until organizations get strategic about AI and define expectations and verification. We even did an episode on “verification” becoming a role—someone checking outputs for accuracy and credibility. We’ll see if that shakes out, but that’s where work slop comes from. I don’t think it’s a long-term problem; it will resolve like the 86 departmental newsletters did.

Neville Hobson:
How do we address the eruption of AI-generated content? Even if it isn’t outright wrong, it’s too much to read—hurting productivity.

Shel Holtz:
Organizations need a strategic approach. Our CEO often says there will be a day the switch flips; if you’re not ready, you’re irrelevant. The orgs allowing prodigious work slop haven’t reached—or acted on—that conclusion. They need governance, training, and clear “assist vs. automate” boundaries.

Neville Hobson:
Thanks very much, Dan—terrific report. TypePad caught my attention. I was on TypePad from 2004, moved to WordPress in 2006, kept TypePad as an archive until 2021. Interesting—and urgent—to hear it’s ending. Migration is easy except images; that’s not trivial. I know three people still on TypePad with no idea the door’s about to shut. Good callout.

Shel Holtz:
I was never a TypePad user, but many early influential blogs were there—Heather Armstrong’s Dooce, PostSecret, Freakonomics before it became a podcast. We’ve been doing this long enough to cover birth, life, and death.

Neville Hobson:
We have. Dan also mentioned Mastodon introducing commenting—probably a big deal. I’m not hugely active there. What do you think?

Shel Holtz:
I still have a Mastodon instance—interested to dig in. I was more intrigued by the Vimeo item. They’ve struggled to define a niche in YouTube’s world—often pitching private, high-quality business video hosting. I still get pitched. But one constant headache in internal comms is getting the right message to the right people. If you’ve ever sent a company-wide update because you weren’t sure who needed it—or spent hours hunting down the right list—you know the pain.

That’s why a research paper from Amazon’s Reliability and Maintenance Engineering team caught my eye: “An explainable natural language framework for identifying and notifying target audiences in enterprise communication.” In plain terms: a system that lets you ask in natural language who should get your message, then the AI not only finds the audience but explains how it got there.

Example: “Reach all maintenance technicians working with VendorX’s conveyor belts at European sites.” The system parses that, queries a knowledge graph of equipment, people, and locations, and returns the audience—with reasoning (“here’s how we matched VendorX… here’s how we identified European facilities…”). Explainability is critical; in safety contexts you can’t trust a black box.

Implications: we struggle with over- and under-communication. We over-broadcast because we don’t trust lists; we miss people who need the info. A framework like this could make targeting as easy as writing a sentence—with transparency you can trust. It mirrors marketing’s move from “Hi, {FirstName}” to real context-aware personalization. Employees aren’t different from customers: they don’t want spam; they want relevant comms.

Challenges: privacy concerns about graphing people and work, the need to validate reasoning, and data quality (titles, records). But it’s a blueprint for rethinking audience targeting—imagine HR or IT change comms targeting precisely with explainability. It’s research, not a product yet, but communicators should watch this closely.

Neville Hobson:
Good explanation. I couldn’t find a simple one online—Amazon’s site doesn’t surface it well. Amusingly, an AI Overview explained it best, which is a good illustration of why traditional search is fading. My question: is this live at Amazon?

Shel Holtz:
I don’t think so—it’s a framework for consideration. Presumably they’d build it for Amazon first, then maybe market or license it. If you’ve worked in internal comms, you know targeting is hard; the info you need often isn’t accessible. This gives you the ability to do it—and verify it. I can’t wait to try it someday.

Neville Hobson:
Calendar marker set. Share that AI Overview with me—I’ll screenshot it.

Shel Holtz:
Copy and paste works, too.

Neville Hobson:
In recent episodes we’ve explored how the press release keeps reinventing itself. Far from dead, it moved from media distribution to SEO—and now, according to Sarah Evans (partner and head of PR at Zen Media), into a generative-AI visibility engine. In a long read, she describes testing a press release about Zen Media acquiring Optimum7, distributed via GlobeNewswire, then tracking how it was picked up not just by news outlets but by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI. Within six hours, ChatGPT cited it 40 times; Meta’s external agents 17 times; Perplexity Bot and Applebot twice. Evans said there were 61 documented AI mentions in total in that period.

Implications: press releases aren’t just reaching journalists or Google—they’re feeding AI systems people use to ask questions and make decisions. The key metric becomes: is it retrievable when AI is asked a critical question in our space?

We’ve covered this angle a few times—from “Is PR dead (again)?” to the reinvention of releases for algorithms—and now this: the release as a tool for persistent retrievability and authority in the age of AI. If AI engines are the new gatekeepers, how should communicators rethink writing and measurement? What do you think, Shel?

Shel Holtz:
I’m glad you’re citing Sarah Evans—she’s terrific. We should invite her on the interview show. In another post—“10 PR myths I’m seeing”—she debunks “Press releases don’t matter.” She says they matter more than ever. We’re seeing early results with releases averaging about 285 citations in ChatGPT within 30 days. That suggests LLMs treat press releases as credible sources—especially when picked up in reputable places.

She also talks structured information. Gini Dietrich recently suggested having a page on your site not linked anywhere—meant for AI crawlers—with structured/markdown versions of the content so AI can better understand and apply it. Bottom line: press releases aren’t going anywhere. Every time someone proclaims them dead, they persist. (Side rant: embargoes aren’t real unless we agreed in advance.)

Neville Hobson:
I ranted about embargoes recently too. One question: what does retrievability mean for communicators? If AI engines, not journalists or search engines, arbitrate visibility, how do PR teams measure success differently? Are AI citations more valuable than traditional pickups?

Shel Holtz:
Both are valuable. Search has declined, but not to zero—not even to 50%. People still search. Some haven’t adopted AI for search; some queries are better served by ten links than an overview. (When we were in Rome, I searched for restaurants open before 7 p.m.—classic Google links job.) Sarah Evans’s myth list also says “Choose traditional or modern PR” is false—the strongest strategies use a dual pathway. As Mitch Joel says, “and,” not “instead of.”

Neville Hobson:
Worth reading Sarah’s Substack—and the link you’ll put in the notes—to make you think.

Shel Holtz:
Absolutely. I’ll probably be doing a press release in the next week or two—can’t say more, but it’s coming. One more debate: how people actually use AI. Ethan Mollick argues people lean on AI for higher-level cognitive tasks—framing, sense-making, brainstorming—rather than just automating grunt work. Recent usage studies from OpenAI and Anthropic offer fresh data.

OpenAI’s analysis of ChatGPT usage shows augmentation—writing, editing, summarizing, brainstorming, decision support. “Asking” (decision support) has become the largest slice—aligning with “thinking partner.” Anthropic paints a different enterprise picture for Claude: businesses use it chiefly to automate workflows, coding, math-heavy tasks, document processing, and reporting pipelines. Automation exceeds augmentation; some quantify ~three-quarters of enterprise use as automation patterns.

Zooming out, Forbes’s overview with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ipsos notes adoption is broadening fast, trust is uneven, and behaviors vary by context. ZDNet frames it succinctly: ChatGPT is mostly used for writing and decision support (often non-work or para-work tasks), while Claude skews toward structured enterprise automation—coding and back-office flows.

So where does that leave Mollick’s claim? Both realities are true depending on the user and context. Among general knowledge workers, AI is a thinking companion; among engineering/operations teams and API-wired apps, AI acts as an automation substrate.

Implications for communicators:

AI is in the room at the idea stage—become editors, synthesizers, and standard-setters.

Automation is marching into comms-adjacent workflows—govern quality, provenance, and accountability.

Don’t pick a side; design for both—declare the “assist vs. automate” boundary, instrument the pipeline with checks and tags, build a “thinking partner” prompt bench, and mind the labor story by narrating changes transparently.

Neville Hobson:
Good advice. ZDNet’s split between personal and non-personal use was interesting. I’m a mixed user—lots of research that’s kind of work-related. I use ChatGPT mostly; not Claude lately. One note: I used ChatGPT for coding when I rebuilt my website on Ghost—editing theme templates with Handlebars. ChatGPT was astonishingly good—especially after GPT-5—at brainstorming workarounds and generating CSS/JS tweaks that worked perfectly on first publish. Claude also pinpointed issues following theme dev instructions. For a non-coder, that was huge confidence. These tools were brilliant alongside Docker and VS Code. I’m impressed.

Shel Holtz:
No question ChatGPT does very well with code; all frontier LLMs do. Claude currently tops some benchmarks (SWE-Bench, HumanEval, etc.) and is marketed heavily to developers, with strong APIs and tool integrations. OpenAI pushes ChatGPT more broadly—consumer and enterprise—so you see “what should I wear tonight?” and recipes alongside enterprise tasks. I’ve read that Gen Z uses AI to make basic day-to-day decisions—fascinating.

Neville Hobson:
The report says ChatGPT usage hit 700 million weekly users as of July. Growth is relatively faster in low- and middle-income countries. Early users were ~80% men; now about 48%, with more active users having typically feminine first names (their method). Useful metrics—but what does it mean to the average communicator? Hopefully they don’t walk away thinking “ChatGPT is only for coding.”

Shel Holtz:
Right—the point is not either/or. There are two valid use modes—collaborative and automated. Provide resources, tools, policies, guardrails, and governance so people can use both modes effectively. You can’t have a Wild West; you need standards you can support. But beware of swinging too far. I spoke to a company restricting staff to an internal AI that can’t do what NotebookLM does—hamstringing themselves. Organizations need to be pragmatic.

And that will wrap up episode 482, our long-form episode for September 2025.

Neville Hobson:
Market conditions will impact that approach, I bet. Okay.

Shel Holtz:
Right now we’re planning to record our long-form October episode on Saturday the 25th or Sunday the 26th—depends on Neville’s schedule. Either works for me. That episode will drop Monday, October 27. We’ll have short mid-week episodes in between, maybe even an interview—we’re lining up one or two. Until then, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #482: What Will It Take to Stop the Slop? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel dive into one of the hottest debates in communication today: what happens to tone and authenticity when artificial intelligence steps into the writing process? From the surprisingly heated arguments over the humble em-dash to fresh research on AI’s “stylometric fingerprints,” we explore whether polished AI-assisted prose risks losing the human voice that builds trust. Along the way, we look at how publishers like Business Insider are normalizing AI for first drafts, how communicators are redefining authenticity, and how Shel used AI to turn years of blog posts into a forthcoming book.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz (00:01)

@nevillehobson (00:08)

Do we risk losing individuality, nuance and trust if everything starts to sound the same? We’ll talk about that right after this.

It’s a debate playing out among communicators. This year, the humble M-dash has become a flashpoint. Some insist that overusing M-dashes is a dead giveaway of AI altered text. Others push back saying that’s nonsense and unfairly stigmatizes a perfectly good mark of punctuation. Washington Post ran a feature in April with the headline, Some people think AI writing has a tell. The M-dash writers disagree. Then in August, Brian Phillips wrote a lyrical defense in the ringer.

pleading, stop AI shaming our precious kindly M-Dashes, please. And McSweeney’s even joined him as satire, publishing the M-Dash response to the AI allegations written from the dashes own point of view. That is really, really very amusing, worth a read. The fact that such debates exists highlights how sensitive people are to the signals of authenticity in writing. Fresh research in 2025 suggests this is more than speculation.

Some recent studies show that AI leaves stylometric fingerprints in writing that can be detected, raising questions about authorship and voice. A stylometric fingerprint is the unique combination of statistical linguistic features within a piece of text that identifies its author much like a human fingerprint. AI can make writing clearer and more polished but risks homogenizing style and raising ethical questions. Beyond academia, commentators argue that polished words without voice

risk-leaving communication hollow. And while researchers are busy analyzing stylometry and psycholinguistics, communicators are having a very different kind of debate about punctuation. So while academics study the fingerprints AI leaves on writing, the popular imagination has latched onto something much simpler, the punctuation choices we make. The M-debate may be tongue in cheek, but it speaks to a serious point.

How sensitive we’ve become to the signals of authenticity in text right down to a single line on the page. For communicators, the challenge is not whether to use AI, that ship has sailed, but how to preserve authenticity when tone shifting tools are in the mix. The call to action is to define what authenticity means in your context, decide which writing tasks AI should support, and ensure human voice and accountability remain front and center.

In the end, and authenticity aren’t about perfectly polished words. They’re about whether people believe there’s a human voice and accountability behind the message. Your thoughts, Shale?

Shel Holtz (03:19)

@nevillehobson (03:28)

Shel Holtz (03:49)

When I was in college, I had a part-time job setting type. Yeah, I’m old enough that I actually set type. And I remember learning when to use the ⁓ dash based on the copy that I was transcribing into typeset. And there were a lot of them, even back then, when most people were still working on typewriters. So I think this notion that it’s a tell is ridiculous.

It’s, as you quoted somebody saying, a perfectly serviceable bit of punctuation. But let’s go beyond this notion of punctuation. mean, leave it to communicators where we have some really weighty issues to deal with that we’re going to spend most of our time talking about punctuation. I think this is one of the reasons leaders don’t take communicators very seriously. They’re thinking about business decisions and we’re thinking about

⁓ letting and kerning and things like that. We really need to get more focused on business outcomes and how communication and the use of AI contributes to that. This is what the Business Insider has done. Business Insider, I don’t know if you saw this, it’s a very recent announcement, have ⁓ officially given permission to their journalists to use AI to write the first drafts of their articles. They were already…

@nevillehobson (05:44)

Shel Holtz (05:47)

fewer people to crank out more stories. And if you can get it done faster by having AI generate a first draft, you then go in and fact check and clean up and apply your own writing to, I’ve done this, I’ve done first drafts in AI. And by the time I’m done rewriting, it’s a completely different piece. Still took me about an hour and a half less than it would have if I had had to sit there and write the first draft. I don’t do that for every kind of

article or other material that I need to produce, but on some things it just makes sense and it makes life easier. But the other reason I think Business Insider decided to go down this road is because AI is getting better at producing these kinds of drafts and it’s going to continue to get better. In the world of business, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience Neville, I know I have, is outside of the world of

communication when you are dealing with people in other parts of the business. And I don’t mean this in any sort of pejorative way. This is not an insult. These people are brilliant when it comes to the areas of specialization that are the focus of their jobs. But they can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag. They’re terrible, terrible writers. And if using AI can help them write a memo, write an email, write a report, write an article,

better than they could have on their own, I think we’re at a point where that’s fine. And as I say, it’s going to continue to improve. If AI can generate a good first draft now, how many months or years before it can generate the good final draft? I heard Casey Newton talking about this on Hartford saying, yeah, maybe ⁓ there’s not going to be work for us journalists anymore when the AI can write all the drafts.

don’t think that’s necessarily the case because the research still involves talking to people and that sort of thing. the writing with AI is getting to the point where I think this is a very transitive conversation that we’re having about authenticity and human writing. think AI is fully capable of doing this in a lot of circumstances and we need to stop our hand wringing about it and figure out how to do it well.

So that it produces the best results we can possibly deliver for our clients and our companies

@nevillehobson (08:50)

voices more than grammar, for instance, AI can clean up text, sure, it can improve text. And you could argue that’s a subjective way, phrase, improve. Others might not see it as improvement. And therein, you get into rabbit holes, without question, which is where we’re at in a lot of this, I think. But AI can clean up text. But I think authenticity demonstrates itself through word choices, rhythm.

even the imperfections. I did something the other day that ChatGPT5 assisted me with, and I thought about this when I mentioned that. Did I assist it or did it assist? No, it assisted me because I asked it to do things. And I noted, kind of taken aback slightly, that on the first draft of what it did, it told me what it was going to do. And it said, I’m going to give this to you in your tone of voice.

And it did. And I read this, goodness, I could have written this myself. And that did take me back a bit. Maybe I’d not noticed that before. But that example also prompted a lot of my thinking into leading up to this discussion today. Because tone ⁓ and authenticity or rather tone, yeah, I mean, it is authenticity.

even though the debate is still there about what defines authenticity, I’ve had discussion that with lot of people is what do mean authentic? What does that actually mean? And it means different things to different people. I think this discussion or debate or whatever we might call describe it is likely to be one of those never ending ones, the dash, you mentioned the Oxford comma, that’s been around for decades, it’s still a major issue for some people. But being clear on this,

And for the reasons I think are quite clear, you mentioned, you know, the large language models, they scrape all this stuff off the off the internet, and it’s got m dashes in, it’s got all this stuff. No one really noticed that until recently. Most people don’t even think about that. I see writing and I even used to use this where I didn’t do m dashes, because that’s not in my background of writing. I do, for instance, on a keyboard.

using WordPerfect back in the day, I might do double hyphen that would convert that into an M dash. I never thought of that even, I didn’t even think about, hey, that’s an M dash, I didn’t even notice. So I don’t like M dashes, actually, the formal way people use them, or the historical way which I see AI doing the same, you got a word, there’s another word, and there’s an M dash in between, and then they’re touching the word. I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of it. So I don’t use M dashes, I use N dashes mostly.

when I do my writing. So this looks neater in my mind and I don’t care about it’s some ⁓ grammar geek is looking at that thing here that alters the meaning of what you’ve written. No, it doesn’t.

Shel Holtz (12:19)

just to point out when I was doing typesetting, and I don’t remember what the rules were because I was 19 at the time, but there were definitely rules about the M dash is used in these conditions and the M dash in those conditions. I don’t remember what they were, but they existed.

@nevillehobson (12:22)

I know,

of course there are rules, of course there are rules. So, but today in 2025, we’re looking at something that is, I guess, out of out of anyone’s control. Now, this this thing will evolve the language. I’m pretty certain of that, particularly. And typically we talk about the English language. The same thing applies in other languages, but English language as the world’s most spoken language.

meaning not native, it doesn’t matter, second language, third language doesn’t matter. It’s different everywhere. And so the rules are shifting. So, you know, I look at ⁓ the economist guides, the APs guide and all this, and indeed, I’ve got a copy of the AP guide from 15 years ago. don’t think anyone follows that now. It’s different. It’s different what you see now. So the ⁓ the web we’re at now is ⁓ beyond ⁓

can you say the the use of AI? I mean, it’s a given, as I mentioned in my intro, whether to use AI that ship has sailed long time ago. But we’re talking about preserving authenticity that exercises a lot of people in right, hence the criticism. I did read a piece by ⁓ I’ve forgotten who it was. It might have been Anne Handley, I think might have been the grammar girl actually talking about this recently. That’s right, right, exactly.

Shel Holtz (14:00)

@nevillehobson (14:04)

Shel Holtz (14:28)

I recently finished the first draft of a book. people who have been following writing. Oh, no, I’ve finished lots and lots of books reading, no, writing. This is a book on employee communication. And it is based on a series of 28 blog posts I wrote based on a framework I developed about 10 or 11 years ago.

@nevillehobson (14:39)

Right, okay.

Shel Holtz (14:58)

And I was listening to Chris Penn talk about how he did a book that Amazon could not challenge him that it was his, even though he leaned heavily on AI for the work. I didn’t do what he did because I already had a first draft with those blog posts, but I adapted his concept. So here’s what I did. I first created a very hefty document that contained a lot of what I have written.

⁓ I still had PDFs of a couple of the books I had written before. I had all of my blog posts, ⁓ many, many articles, this type of thing, even transcripts from some FIR episodes. And I put them in a PDF. And then I created a document ⁓ that said, these are approaches I take to writing. These are words and phrases that I use. I do a lot of parenthetical statements.

And here are things that AI tends to do in writing that I never do and don’t do any of this. And then I created a gem over on Gemini called Write Like Shell. And I loaded both of those documents into it. This was just for this book. And then chapter by chapter, and I started off by giving it the instruction that I’ve got 28 blog posts. I need to turn them into chapters of a business book.

I also need to update case studies because many of these are 11, 12, 13 years old and no longer relevant. And I need to come up with the kinds of elements that you see recurring in chapters of a business book. So I’m going to give you my blog post one at a time using these documents that I have shared, my corpus of my writing and my instructions on my writing and AI writing and how to apply that. Rewrite this post.

as a book chapter. And I was knocked out at how well it did. I still needed to spend an hour on editing and rewriting and making revisions. But I ended up doing that for 28 chapters. Is that an AI written book or is that a shell written book? I would argue that that’s my book. It based what it did on my writing. It did its new version based on how I write. And then I went back and made sure it was my writing.

@nevillehobson (17:48)

Shel Holtz (17:55)

@nevillehobson (18:03)

I agree with you. In fact, what you described is to my mind fits precisely the the label of AI assisted writing. That in my mind, what you’ve just explained is what’s the difference between what you did and between what you might have done if you’d hired a human being assistant to help you do this? What’s the difference? The AI is faster.

Is it accurate? Well, you only you will know that and you’re going to review it all anyway. And this to me is is is totally fine. And you’ve got no you would have no alarm about well, should I kind of write this chunky paragraph explaining that I’ve done it like this? No. Why? Why would you do that? Because similar tools have existed until now that were nowhere near as good as this. I mean, I think if some of the grammar assistance you

get from even in Microsoft Word back in the day, we’re Grammarly now that’s evolving that uses AI. And it’s, ⁓ you know, we got all these tools. Right, you’ve got all this there, which kind of neatly circles back to the main issue here, which is tone and authenticity, how do you still bring that along? And I think that is something where the the the user, the prompter, the communicator, whoever who is

Shel Holtz (19:01)

@nevillehobson (19:25)

ask me questions, how it prompts me and how responsible I ask it to do stuff like that. So that to me is is one way in which you can be confident yourself that the tone and authenticity of your AI assisted writing is okay. And that really is really what it comes out is not about creating a kind of a corporate manual for everyone has to follow. And I think it’s also to do with the comfort levels you have in your perception of that.

piece of writing or reading that someone has written that may have been assisted by AI may not more than often than not, it’s likely to have been assisted by AI. What is wrong with that? Well, a of people find something wrong with that nevertheless. So go back to right.

Shel Holtz (20:38)

four years, no one’s going to be talking about

@nevillehobson (20:45)

if you like, expectations are evolving too, particularly the younger you are. And according to one of the papers I read, younger audiences are comfortable generally speaking with AI polish, but care deeply about whether a message feels authentic. And that’s what we need to be paying attention to. So help in defining authenticity is one job communicators could take on. We’ve got through the training, yes, we know, here’s how you do this with this LLM.

Here’s what you could do with that. Now let’s pay attention to the tone. Are you paying attention to that? So I think the kind of road is shifting in a slightly different direction than otherwise we might expect because of this. And the academic research seems to be backing this up as well. Things are changing fast, it seems to me, and you’ve got to be on the case.

Shel Holtz (22:03)

So, you know, if you do this right, if you use it as a tool and do it right and come up with a workable process, I guarantee you all those people who say, can tell when it was written by AI, they can tell when it was written by AI by somebody who didn’t know what they were doing when they prompted the AI to write something. That’s what they can tell.

@nevillehobson (22:32)

Yeah,

that’s the watchword, I think. And so, by the way, I see this year, I think there’s been at least six books published about internal communication. So everyone’s on a book bandwagon. I hope yours is gonna be slightly different, because they’re all saying the same thing about strategy, what’s important, how to use AI. Yours will be different, right?

Shel Holtz (23:13)

@nevillehobson (23:30)

Shel Holtz (23:42)

@nevillehobson (23:51)

Shel Holtz (23:54)

And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

The post FIR #481: The Em Dash Panic — AI, Writing, and Misguided Assumptions appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

GEO – generative engine optimisation – is suddenly everywhere. Is it the new SEO, a passing fad, or simply good communication practice in disguise?

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson talk with Stephanie Grober, Marketing & PR Director at Horowitz Agency in New York, about why GEO matters, the competing narratives surrounding it, and how communicators should prepare for the impact of generative search.

What we discussed

Stephanie Grober is the Marketing & Public Relations Director at Horowitz Agency, an integrated marketing and public relations agency with offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and Vancouver (B.C.). Her team works with law firm clients ranging from BigLaw to boutiques, designing and executing content and communications strategies that generate bottom-line growth in measurable ways.

Leveraging deep relationships with the press, she delivers high-quality earned media placements for clients and utilizes her extensive marketing background to amplify these results through a multi-channel approach.

Stephanie joined Horowitz Agency in 2021 after serving as Marketing and Communications Manager for a Top 50 accounting firm in New York City.

Relevant Links

https://searchengineland.com/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-444418

Shel Holtz (00:01.989)

Stephanie Grober (00:19.33)

Shel Holtz (00:27.471)

Stephanie Grober (00:40.748)

Shel Holtz (01:13.837)

Stephanie Grober (01:22.7)

And what are those sources? Well, a lot of them are authoritative sources from top publications where you may have a PR professional working with you to get you quoted. So it all circles back to PR, makes it a very exciting time for PR professionals. Those who have already engaged the services of PR consultants or may have PR services happening in-house are a little bit ahead of the curve right now because they’re already going to be appearing in the authoritative sources that AI likes.

@nevillehobson (02:50.272)

Although to be fair, he did talk about what the, the most effective thing to do isn’t to argue about or worry about acronyms or initialisms or whatever. It’s about, building trust, creating clear, incredible content, putting it where you can, which already are. I thought, God, did he listen to our episode or maybe, but of course that was last week, not, the other day. but he did get me thinking about this. Is GEO an evolution of SEO? Is it? the same thing by another name. We talked about this and that’s not what we figured out what’s what’s your take on that?

Stephanie Grober (04:26.786)

I wouldn’t say that they are exactly the same thing, but they are very parallel to each other. I think that if you have successfully been employing SEO strategies as a part of your overall marketing efforts, then you are probably ahead of the curve, as far as GEO. And that would be because you’ve been consistently adding optimized content to your website. You know, which keywords you want to appear in search.

You may have been structuring your content in smart ways that already are answering questions. And that would be all on your own website, right? But now when we’re talking, GEO, we’re talking about getting that content out to external sources and reinforcing many of the same things. So SEO, could say it’s about keywords. GEO is about credibility, but the LLMs, they still have to learn.

So those keywords are gonna be important for them even in your external sources. And overall, what we’re looking for with GEO is mentions and visibility, whether it’s you as an individual or your brand.

Shel Holtz (06:34.097)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re doing research or if you’re just in one of the LLMs doing your job, that Reddit or Quora for that matter will be the dominant source of the information that you get. And yet this chart is everywhere and everybody’s talking about it. I confess, I went to our leadership in the organization I work and I said, we need to be in Reddit. And now…

It appears I was just chasing a shiny object or a magic bullet. How do you stay on top of what is working in this generative EO space?

Stephanie Grober (08:16.376)

AI overviews simply because of how the content is structured in a very human questioning way, but it’s not going to be the right place for everybody. So when we take a look at that at Horowitz agency as PR professionals working with law firms or other other business professionals, there’s some other interesting stats. I think that stood out. So Muckrack put out a great report recently also analyzing which sites are read by AI.

And I believe it was almost 30 % of the sources are journalistic outlets with prominence and attention paid to outlets like Reuters, AP, Axios, for example. So those are sort of your tier one media. So that is a strategy you can employ for your credibility. If you don’t think that Reddit is the right place for you, okay, then let’s go after the tier one media

Now I will caveat that by saying, niche outlets are also very important to AI. So don’t think that you have to be an AP or Reuters. If you ask a niche question, it is very likely that the AI is going to read a niche or trade press outlet. So those are very valuable as well. But overall journalistic sources are a very valuable way to start appearing in GEO results. That’s where from a PR perspective, we can start maximizing our approach and our strategies, tailoring them there to support GEO.

@nevillehobson (10:21.792)

Stephanie Grober (10:51.534)

So the best approach today is to make sure that as part of your overall marketing plan, PR is included and you have a comprehensive… hopefully you already have that, but if you don’t have that and you’re thinking, I want to make sure that we’re doing GEO right, don’t neglect PR. There’s a few parts of the PR process. First one is just having your sources become media trained and responsive. And again, that takes time to be comfortable speaking to the press, to identify what they want to comment on, to give good sound bites.

That all takes some practice. So somebody who’s just starting out in PR might not be comfortable if the Wall Street Journal calls them on day one and they’re like, this is my first rodeo. So you wanna have some practice working with smaller outlets. Again, working with those trade publications which are still going to be very valuable.

So we don’t only wanna prioritize tier one, but just having a variety of PR opportunities, seeing what works best, that’s something that takes some time. So if you’re not already doing that as part of your PR strategies, the time to start is now, it’s all going to benefit your GEO. And then another key part of this is making sure the messaging is consistent. And that is down to the way you are cited in the press, for example

So, you know, as one example that comes to mind is if you’re somebody who is always referred to in the press as a celebrity criminal defense attorney over and over, that’s going to train the LLMs. When somebody is searching for a celebrity criminal defense attorney, you’re gonna come up in that AI overview because the reporters have referred to you that way in interviews. So how you present yourself to the media and how they cite you is important. It’s important to be consistent.

And then of course, you know, what you’re saying in each opportunity matters too, but I think down to the way that you are cited is, very key.

@nevillehobson (13:24.213)

So where does this fit in that case? And probably the example you gave is someone brand new to this to PR just starting out suddenly is immersed in all this. What, how do you deal with this in this changing environment?

Stephanie Grober (14:36.91)

They can’t exist without each other because otherwise, you know, what has authority, what do we trust, right, to build a response from the AI. So like you said, Nebel, the landscape is changing. There’s new outlets every day. That continues to happen to myself and my team. We’re constantly discovering new outlets.

There’s journalists who have left major newsrooms, who have started their own newsletters, they’re on Substack, they’re podcasting. All of this is important, is the good news when we’re talking GEO, because GEO assesses a very wide variety of sources, including video, including podcasts. So I recommend that anyone who is wading into PR take as many opportunities as they’re comfortable with.

And again, don’t only hold out for Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Take a variety because you never know what is going to give you the most bang for your buck or where somebody is going to discover you. This is all about discoverability. This is about mentions. And the more you can do it, the better. All of the LLMs have their own way of reviewing sources at this point. They are not consistent.

There is not one formula that they’re using, whether it’s chat GPT or Claude or perplexity. Some of them use journalistic sources at a higher rate than others. Some of them use smaller outlets. Some of them have partnerships with major newsrooms like Financial Times to train the AI. So we’re in the very early stages.

That’s why, again, I don’t think that there is a one size fits all formula. I don’t think that there is a magic bullet today where it’s do it this way or you’re going to fail. It’s be prepared to be flexible, but be everywhere that you can. So as things shift, you’re still ahead of the curve. And anyone who has been a marketer through the rise of digital marketing, I think is probably familiar with that, and anyone who has been on the internet since the beginning of the internet is probably familiar with that, right?

When I grew up, it was the dawn of Wikipedia and things have really changed. We just got Google. I remember the first time a librarian told me about Google. So this is all gonna change. It’s gonna change very rapidly. It could go away. It could be the most important part of marketing I don’t think we know yet.

Shel Holtz (17:50.39)

Stephanie Grober (18:16.046)

And again, it might be certain keywords, certain questions that you want to prioritize, but that’s the easiest way just to be the end user and see how you come up, ask, ask the LLMs to describe you, to describe your brand, your company and see what comes back to you. so again, it’s not going to be perfect. We see a lot of errors or mistakes or misassignments of names and things when we do this.

So, you know, this is not the be all and end all to being successful. And I will say that, you know, AI search accounts today for, I think less than 30 % of search traffic. So, fortunately it’s not the only driver of traffic and, you know, discoverability, so we have a little time to iron out those kinks.

@nevillehobson (19:35.906)

Stephanie Grober (20:03.592)

in working with attorneys thought leadership is huge. Attorneys are always writing. They’re speaking. can repurpose their content. So there’s always fresh content going up, on websites and things like that. one thing I wanted to mention too, as, as we’re discussing this, whether it’s a brand that builds their own content platform, or a company working with content in another way is that the LLMs prefer recent and fresh content.

So, you if you were writing or speaking or quoted in the press five, six, seven years ago, that’s not gonna help you today. It’s time to get back out there. In the past 12 months or so is ideal with ongoing fresh content. So just something to keep in mind because I know, you know, time passes quickly and we’re like, when was I quoted? No, it was like five years ago.

Anyway, back to the content. I think that’s a very smart and strategic play if it can be supported. We know that marketers only have so much time in their day. There’s a lot of things that demand attention. So you have to choose to prioritize what makes the most sense and is a sustainable effort for your team.

Shel Holtz (21:43.063)

Stephanie Grober (22:32.75)

Now, if you put out press release across the wire, meaning in most cases you’re paying to put it out across the wire, that might be something that hits an LLM and is used to train on a certain topic. So in some ways, a press release still can have influence in that way. Other than that, the typical press release is not going far these days. It’s very difficult to maximize a press release.

We are competing for attention in the media landscape. There are less journalists. There is more news. The news cycle is shortened. It’s not even 24 hours. It’s about 24 minutes, it feels like most times. So just your standard press release, not put across the wire, not going far for most companies, you know, unless you are a enterprise corporation or, you know, very exciting in some other way.

@nevillehobson (23:58.229)

Shel Holtz (24:12.945)

Stephanie Grober (24:20.301)

@nevillehobson (24:20.936)

But this notion of repurposing press releases to take into account the audience change, i.e. it’s not people, it’s the algorithm. I’m not using the word machine. I see people talk about it’s the machines. It’s not the machines. It’s the algorithm, right? So I think that is a credible view.

I disagree with you there, Shel. I think that is something that we are seeing that you need to prepare your content to publish it online with two audiences in mind, which are the humans and the algorithms. And the example Shel mentioned that we discussed specifically in an episode was somebody who has thought this through, it’s a really good visual explainers on the differences between them. They made a lot of sense to me, I have to say.

But is it going to be like the press release, the social media press release from 2006 to 2010, that was a template of the things you should include for social media to take advantage of it generated quite a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz, lot of hype and ultimately just kind of faded away. It didn’t really, you know, attract a lot of attention.

Is this likely to be the same case? I wonder. So I think this does this is important this change along with all the other things that we’ve been discussing. And I just wonder where this is going to fit if people are going to be creating press releases where the prime audience they’re thinking of is an algorithm. Where does that fit into the picture?

Stephanie Grober (26:19.436)

The LLMs, the algorithm, it has to address the human at the end user who has a question and is seeking information and it has to answer that question.

Shel Holtz (27:23.025)

I’m thinking of the great content marketing that comes out of Microsoft where they’ll have a lengthy feature, but it contains some short videos. It contains some short audio clips. It has infographics and photos and text. And it’s all there in that format so that whoever wants to use it can just grab that audio file and maybe use it in a radio broadcast or just grab that video clip and use it in a TV news report. Does that make sense? Should we be focused more on content marketing and less on more traditional forms of communication?

Stephanie Grober (28:34.432)

So this shouldn’t be groundbreaking to anybody, but think about variety in your content. Think about making sure it’s answering questions, play with the format, use various types of multimedia to support your content. I think that is absolutely a sound approach today.

@nevillehobson (29:35.04)

What impact is that having, do you think, and will continue to have on search generally and how you measure search, whether it’s GEO or SEO, how big of a concern should that be that people are not clicking through? And by the way, I’ve seen some reports in the last few days, which I haven’t bookmarked, frankly, but they’re talking about, you know, this is not what’s happening. People are clicking through. That doesn’t seem to fit what I see.

I don’t know, respectable search results being produced or data being produced showing that that is not the case. What’s your thought on that, Stephanie?

Stephanie Grober (30:36.482)

And again, it comes back to the content marketing that we were just talking about. Folks land somewhere else now in your website environment. I think it varies very much brand to brand, company to company, depends on what type of answer the end user was seeking.

And then again, we have to think, is everybody trusting AI? Personally today, I don’t fully trust the answers AI is giving me. I’m always going to go back and research them. Now that might change individual to individual, generation to generation, but it’s not perfect yet. So, you know, I don’t think we’re at a place where somebody is just going to solely get their questions answered by AI and go about their day.

Maybe we will get there and we will see a real sea change in the way web traffic works, but I don’t think this is going to completely break the system. And I don’t think it’s going to end search traffic as we know it. and you know, if folks are answering a question where they need something, they’re still going to have to click through to get it. AI can’t procure something for you. perhaps it can answer a question, but most likely you’re going to want to click through to read further and do your own research if the AI is just producing relevant sources for you.

Shel Holtz (32:38.473)

Stephanie Grober (33:08.174)

Rather, they embrace the fundamentals of great marketing and then make sure that everything that is put out adheres, complies, represents the brand consistently and correctly. There’s a lot of layers of approval. Anyone working in corporate marketing is probably very accustomed to that. And I think that that’s a great thing. We are not trying to utilize any gimmicks.

We are not trying to trick the AI because we have to stand behind what is put out on behalf of our clients. And when you’re talking about professional services, that’s really guidance and counsel to folks with very important personal or business questions.

Shel Holtz (34:24.593)

Stephanie Grober (34:49.132)

But then they are prioritizing the value giving advice that their professionals can provide. So it might not take as many billable hours on research, but you might get more value in the conversation with your attorney or advisor. Of course, marketers are using AI in very interesting ways.

But again, it’s not perfect. So I think it’s still very early stages. Certainly it’s not replacing anyone in these industries yet today. And we’ll see if we get to a point where it will. Now, the same can be said for communications professionals. Is AI going to take our jobs? I personally think if AI is writing all the content, then… wouldn’t we reach a point where human written content is actually at a premium and bespoke and in demand? Because how can you stand out in a sea of AI written content, right? That doesn’t sound appealing at all. I mean, that’s not what I wanna read. hopefully we’ll still be here in five years.

Shel Holtz (36:36.049)

Stephanie Grober (36:54.516)

@nevillehobson (37:11.518)

Stephanie Grober (37:58.167)

Of course there was the Google antitrust case decision this week where, know, they’re keeping chrome and Gemini is going to be, feeding us its results. So I don’t see that going anywhere in the next year. I will be watching to see if AI search gets smarter and gets more accurate. and how our clients or those I work with appear in the search. So it will be sort of testing for us.

Of course, we’ll be looking out for more case studies of it leading to work. Anecdotally, there are folks in legal who are saying, yes, I’ve gotten clients from chat GPT searches, which is great. I personally know that there are some attorneys I’ve worked with in corporate law, for example, who after a great streak of appearing in outlets like Wall Street Journal, CFO.com, know, AI will tell me about them if I say who is a great &A attorney in Los Angeles. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I’ll be looking for in the next year. I can’t say that definitively we’re going to see a sweeping change more than that.

Shel Holtz (39:44.634)

I’m not sure that’s the answer, but certainly budgets aren’t keeping up with volume. The point was made that this individual did not get more budget to help create all that content. So if your firm were hired by a communications leader and asked you to adjust their content strategy for GEO, what process changes would you recommend, say, over the first 90 days?

Stephanie Grober (40:42.35)

We do probably over 500 nominations for our clients each year. So that is always a part of our strategy, but very important. I’d be looking at online reviews, whether for a company, could be your Google My Business reviews. It could be Yelp, Facebook, wherever you might get reviewed, in whatever way you might get reviewed. And then making sure that the client is out there, mentioned and visible again.

Each month, fresh mentions in journalistic outlets, whether they are prestige media or trade press, they still have value. Multimedia, getting them on video, getting them in podcasts anywhere we can. And then from a content strategy as a marketer, hopefully at this point you are repurposing, but use AI and let it help you repurpose.

There’s so many tips and tricks that marketers can use when it comes to AI. And that includes taking what you already have and making it new, repurposing it into different formats to make your job a little bit easier. So that today is one of the biggest benefits of having AI available to us as a tool to make content production easier.

@nevillehobson (42:30.014)

Stephanie Grober (42:53.998)

So even as we are working to boost GEO results, doing public relations, getting media mentions, we’re working with people. You have a PR professional, you have a client source, you have a journalist who’s a person, and that is still very valuable. AI can’t do that for us, it’s relationship driven. So make sure people are doing your PR, not AI.

@nevillehobson (43:43.818)

But is that kind of like a serious disruptive element suddenly appearing on the horizon that will have a huge impact on this amongst many, many, but think specifically what we’re discussing today and the change it might bring to that where you’re introducing AI team members in a team. What do you think about that?

Stephanie Grober (45:00.706)

So, you we pitch byline articles for clients all the time. A lot of newsrooms now have a, you know, a disclaimer that we may reject your piece if we think it’s written by AI. So it remains to be seen, you know, there are AI helpers, they’re on our teams right now, you know, how many companies are incorporating AI, we do have AI teammates.

We’re figuring out the best use for them. Some are better than others. Some are more trusting of AI than others. And some folks are more clever to use it as a tool than others. when it comes to communicating back and forth with artificial intelligence completely, the more strategic and in depth you get, just don’t know if that’s what we’re going to see in the very near future.

Shel Holtz (46:29.649)

If I develop a strategy and I want somebody to play devil’s advocate, I can’t go to my $400 an hour consultant, I don’t have a budget for that. So I’ll just ask the AI consultant. I realize that it’s not as good, but in the absence of any alternatives, it’s fine. And it has come up with some really good responses. So…

Stephanie Grober (47:18.7)

It’s changing, it’s evolving so rapidly that, you know, don’t put all your eggs into one basket. Don’t buy into a one size fits all approach today. It’s still too soon. And don’t abandon your other marketing strategies or tactics in favor of some of the AI driven ones.

Shel Holtz (48:03.843)

Stephanie Grober (48:23.146)

Thank you guys very much for the time today.

The post FIR Interview: Generative Engine Optimisation with Stephanie Grober appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this reflective follow-up to our FIR Interview in July with Monsignor Paul Tighe of the Vatican, Neville and guest co-host Silvia Cambié revisit some of the key themes that resonated deeply from that conversation.

With a particular focus on the wisdom of the heart – a phrase coined by the Vatican to contrast with the logic of machines – Neville and Silvia explore the ethical responsibilities communicators face in the age of artificial intelligence.

The discussion ranges from the dignity of work and the overlooked realities of outsourced labour, to the limitations of technical expertise when values and human well-being are at stake.

Silvia expands on her Strategic article focusing on precarious workers, while Neville revisits ideas shared on his blog about the Church’s unique role in advocating for inclusive, human-centred dialogue around AI.

Above all, this episode highlights how communicators are uniquely positioned to help organisations navigate the moral and societal questions AI presents – and why they must bring emotional intelligence, narrative skill, and ethical awareness to the forefront of this global conversation.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

@nevillehobson (00:03)

Silvia Cambie (00:17)

@nevillehobson (00:21)

He was instrumental in the development of Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican’s note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence published in January 2025. In our interview, Monsignor Tighe offered a powerful reflection on how AI challenges us not only technically, but also morally and spiritually. He urged us to consider what makes us human in an age of machines, calling for a global conversation grounded in dignity.

agency and what the Vatican calls the wisdom of the heart. So in this episode, Silvia and I want to share what resonated most for us from that conversation and why we believe communicators have a vital role to play in shaping this future. I mentioned this before during the interview, Silvia, that you were instrumental in securing that interview. So tell our listeners, how did it come about?

Silvia Cambie (01:38)

the interaction between humans and AI and the dignity of work. So we were thinking of bringing these voices to the forefront and in particular in relation to your listeners, your listeners and Shel’s listeners who work in comms and work in change management and are often confronted with the moral aspects, values.

the ethical part of governance. And at the moment, they’re looking for a North Star because we are at the forefront as communicators of this wave of AI introductions, AI pilots. But we, at the same time, we often lack guidance. So that’s why we wanted to collect these views from the Vatican, from Monsignor Tighe.

relate them to our work, make them very concrete and kind of actionable, something for our listeners to use, to be able to use. And so I think you were mentioning before what resonated with us, with you and me. And so we had our conversation with Paul Tighe back at the end of July. And then we

@nevillehobson (03:10)

Silvia Cambie (03:25)

@nevillehobson (03:36)

Silvia Cambie (03:52)

And that is creating a certain dynamic which I have witnessed many times when I work in managed services, which is you’re basically following the rhythm of a machine and you have no time to think, you have no time to develop new ideas, to stop and ponder and get insight out of what you’re doing, out of what your client needs. So at the end of the day, everybody loses.

⁓ You don’t have fresh ideas. The client doesn’t get a fresh view or, you know, fresh recommendations on how to do things. So it’s all very mechanistic and it’s a real risk out there that people, you know, will have to follow the rhythm of machines in the work. And therefore what Paul Tighe mentioned.

which is the wisdom of the heart, as you mentioned before, the ability to relate to other people, how you relate to your client and solve their problems. So I think I’ve seen that in my work and I think that is a real risk. And we have to be aware of that. And as communicators and change managers, there’s a lot we can do because we are on the front lines.

And yeah, so I think this point about technology, that technology is never neutral and that ⁓ there’s this risk and danger that we will have to follow the pace of machines and lose the wisdom of the heart and lose the ability to draw insight from what we do. That’s something that really resonated with me.

@nevillehobson (06:01)

But also what struck me that I noticed was his knowledge, his ability, as it were, to understand the role of social media in communicating with people. And we noticed that the Vatican was pretty proactive on many social channels. And indeed, Paul Tighe was at one point ⁓ in the Dicastery of Communication, kind of like the Communications Department, in charge of all of this.

So they have a track record, a history, if you will, of knowing how to use social channels to engage with wide audiences, not just the faithful of the church, but broadly a wider audience. And that’s something we observed. And then this document, Antiqua et Nova, I found it an extraordinary document of what it set forth, what it described.

and the focus in particular on that phrase, wisdom of the heart, that resonated very strongly with me. I found it interesting too that the conversations that the Vatican had been having, notably with Paul Tighe, but not only ⁓ Monsignor Tighe, others too, with leaders of Silicon Valley companies, of the big tech firms in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta

We’ve had, you know, we’ve seen more Google, Microsoft, others gathering in a number of instances over the past year or so, ever since Pope Francis’s time to talk about this, where the Vatican was able to introduce this theme, this broader theme of the wisdom of the heart. And it struck me too, that Paul Tighe was quite clear and mentioned the Vatican is not claiming

expertise in AI systems or algorithm design, which by the way, struck me too. We keep talking about the machines. It’s not machines, it’s algorithms we should be worried about. Instead, it offers something that the tech industry and many governments sorely lack. I agree with this completely, a deep concern for long-term consequences you nudged on that point, Silvia, just now, and the consistent voice on the value of human dignity, agency and solidarity. So the wisdom of the heart,

Silvia Cambie (08:09)

@nevillehobson (08:29)

So for instance, subsequent to the interview, and this was actually quite recently, about a week or so back, Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote in an essay that we must build AI for people, not to be a person. In other words, AI is not a person. We hear a lot about, and I’ve had conversations with people about this, these so-called personas, the way in which you can create something that’s a duplicate of you almost. It’s like a version of you as a person.

I think that’s crazy to do that, to be frank, because that reinforces everything that we don’t want reinforcing, if you will. But Suleyman makes the case that the real risk we face is not AI suddenly waking up with consciousness, as some people talk about, but people being convinced that it has, because it’s not sentient. That’s a firm belief that I have. These are electronic devices and tools, not actual

versions of people. We’re not there yet. That’s quite a way away, I would say, if ever. But Suleyman goes on to say, this is the interesting bit to me, I want to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another and strengthens our connections to the real world. We won’t always get it right. But this humanist frame provides us with a clear North Star to keep working towards. I mean, that couldn’t be simpler either, could it? And this is the head.

of a division of one of the biggest technology companies on the planet, Microsoft, saying that. And I’ve seen others in the industry saying similar things recently. So maybe this is beginning to get attention. And I can’t say, of course, that it’s a direct result only what the Vatican has been talking about, but that surely must be having an influence. So I summarized all this just for me. Quite simply, emotional, moral and ethical intelligence must guide communicators response to AI.

The big question is how,

Silvia Cambie (10:50)

@nevillehobson (11:06)

Silvia Cambie (11:14)

people being disenfranchised at work. And I think that there is a quote by UNESCO that I really like, and I have used it in the article I wrote for Strategic, the online platform for communicators. It says that ⁓ AI is about anthropological disruption, right? It’s not only how the…

@nevillehobson (11:48)

Silvia Cambie (12:04)

⁓ wrap some governance around AI, AI applications, rollouts. And what I’ve seen is, know, centers of excellence being created in companies. Those centers of excellence oversee AI pilots, for instance, the progress. So, and have, you know, the usual suspects sitting on them, which are, you know, people from IT, developers.

But I think it’s very important that communicators and change managers become part of those fora because communicators know how to talk to people. Again, they’ve been doing that for forever. That’s their bread and butter. Also, they can relate to previous tech rollouts, you know, like a workplace technology and how people had reacted to that. So there is all that.

institutional knowledge that is needed now because this shift is so unprecedented. So I kind of cringe every time people show me a COE and AI COE made up only of IT people and developers because that’s not the way to go about it. I really like a start,

statue mentioned a fact you mentioned you and Shel mentioned in a previous FIR episode that I think you were quoting ⁓ studies by MIT and HR dive which says that people are expected to use AI in their daily work but they are not receiving proper training so they are kind of very confused about you know what

you know, this is going to hit my performance indicators. What am I supposed to do? They’re not training me. How am I going to use Co-Pilot? I’m going to download Chat GPT and do my own thing and show that I’m doing something and that hopefully will be enough for my company. So all that needs to be structured. And again, communicators have the knowledge. They have the institutional memory. They have the means and also

they know where the different voices sit in a company. Like when we do research before rolling out AI, we create workshops, we’re representatives from different parts of the company. So in that case, communicators know how to spot those voices because we have worked on on rollout projects before.

@nevillehobson (15:03)

Silvia Cambie (15:07)

to kind of channel what you were saying Neville, you know, the human aspect, what makes us human. It’s the ability to relate to other people. is insight, it is emotional intelligence. And it’s all things that are really needed these days because of this shift. And it’s kind of, you know, a paradox that we are so focused on the technology now, but at the same time,

we would need to focus even more on the human aspect because this challenge is so huge that people are just not prepared for it. And we really need to focus on the human aspect, their abilities, what makes us human in order to enable people to deal with it, right? In order to enable the training, in order to make people feel that they are equipped

@nevillehobson (16:24)

Silvia Cambie (16:26)

But I think that in order, so because this change is so huge, we really have to empower people in an unprecedented way and communicators are very well positioned for that.

@nevillehobson (17:06)

The role of the communicator then is to develop and deliver that but there’s also another aspect which to me is the it touches directly on on what we’re currently discussing, i.e. the human or the humanity element, if you will, that, you know, organizations are looking at adopting AI to improve their efficiency to ⁓ improve their productivity and they will enter scale more without looking at

this aspect? Are they asking the human questions? And that’s the role, in my opinion, of the communicator well placed to do that. So three questions I wrote down that could be where communicators are able to introduce this element in their conversation. Does this technology help deepen trust and empathy? Or does it risk eroding them? That’s a valid question, in my view.

Are we building systems that reintroduce conscience, care and context into conversations, or are we defaulting only to efficiency and output? And the third one, are we ensuring that AI strengthens our connection to each other rather than replacing those with illusions? And I think there are undoubtedly at least a dozen more, but to me, those are great ones to start with that, in a sense, force attention on this rather than just those technically

valid, yet ⁓ stale approaches to all of this. It dehumanizes, if you like. And I think the, just briefly going back to Mustafa Suleyman’s North Star, as he references quite clearly, and the Vatican’s wisdom of the heart, there’s an essential reminder in all of that, to me, which is quite simple to grasp.

To stay human in the age of AI is to place empathy, dignity and care at the heart of design and use, not simply efficiency or the ways algorithms shape our actions. Suleyman directly references that in his essay. And he’s the first technology leader I’ve seen publicly doing that the way he did. It was very clear and is a long essay, by the way, very long, worth reading. So that’s encouraging to see that and it’s worth.

Silvia Cambie (19:07)

Mm-hmm.

@nevillehobson (19:30)

Silvia Cambie (19:51)

This isn’t just about the efficiencies this app is going to create. You’re still dealing with people. Your employees are people, your clients are people, your regulators are people. So you’re still dealing with them. And I think that it’s about empowering people to ask the right questions, right?

So I was referencing before to those COEs that are being created to monitor AI pilots in companies. Well, the conversations there tend to be very technical and always focused on the tech, know, the rollout, the different waves of the rollout. And I think, again, communicators can bring back the human aspect. How are people reacting to this?

Is this making them more happier in their work or is this making them more insecure? As you were saying before, lot of companies are not providing training or not providing the right training. So that makes them insecure. Are they getting more and more confused in the way they are ⁓ dealing with their clients and customers? Because if you have AI that takes

over part of that relationship, what is left for them to do? So there is, it’s a very complex scenario that has to be considered from different aspects. And again, you you mentioned the Suleyman’s North Star and the Wisdom of the Heart ⁓ mentioned by Monsignor Tighe. I think these are kind of, sort of, these,

thoughts can inspire communicators, can inspire people who work in AI governance and make them pause and think that it’s important to focus on these aspects, to focus on what Suleyman was saying, the fact that people might expect AI ⁓ to be, might think that AI is conscious and they might.

establish, you know, develop a relationship of a certain kind with it so that they end up depending from the algorithm, depending from, you know, expecting approval. And so I think that now is the time to stop and think and introduce those thoughts into the conversations that are going on in companies about AI. And I think

@nevillehobson (22:33)

Silvia Cambie (22:51)

into the conversation. And again, you know, it’s a moving target, right? We will continue to look for voices like Monsignor Tighe, like Mustafa Suleyman I’m sure as we progress, there will be others and there will be other aspects. But I think that it’s just this…

@nevillehobson (23:17)

Silvia Cambie (23:37)

@nevillehobson (23:52)

Silvia Cambie (24:04)

about the technologies. then, you know, these are all tools that we can use to make our point and to make our point ⁓ stick. So I think, as I said, this is a lot of, know, the target, this is a moving target. We’ll have to do a lot more work on this, but it is fascinating for communicators because

You know, I get off often, I get asked by people in comms. So, you know, how do I shift to tech and I am not a developer and I don’t have the right knowledge in AI and I don’t know how to build an LLM. I, my answer is, is basically this, right? Make sure, bring the human voice into the conversation. do you know how to talk to the base?

you know how to collect their voices, or you know how to collect their views, make sure that they are heard, because it is important as we go forward. So I think that is what communicators can do. And that is a very important role indeed at the moment.

@nevillehobson (25:37)

tech tools, the chatbots, the means by which people connect with others and discover things themselves. And it’s Silicon Valley based and tends to be in English more than the other language. But we’re seeing some interesting things happening. Latin America. Peru is leading the charge on building a Spanish language chatbot that serves communities throughout Latin America, taking into account

cultural nuances, language differences, and the values that are unique to those communities in that part of the world that are very much not global North style environments, if you like. We’ve got what the Vatican is doing that we’ve just been discussing from that interview with Monsignor Tighe calling for an AI shaped by human dignity. And then just literally yesterday,

this this this a few days ago this past week. Saudi Arabia is asserting its cultural sovereignty, let’s put it that way in digital form, with the launch of an Arabic language chat bot called HUMAIN Chat. And it’s based on a large language model that’s Arabic, the largest in the Arabic speaking world, the developer says. And that’s intended to be

targeted at people of the Islamic faith globally, that’s two billion or so, Arabic speakers throughout the world, 400 million or so of them. At the moment, it’s just in Saudi Arabia. I’ve seen quite a bit of buzz building up about this over the past week, mostly focused on the tech, because it is quite new. The point I’m making though, is that with HUMAIN Chat and the others,

These are signs that the future of AI will not be written in only one language or framed by just one set of values. And that’s something I think we should all be paying very close attention to. And it enables, I think, some, it broadens out, if you will, the part of bringing the human element into the conversation, where you’ve got tools that can be a great help in that goal, in bringing that human part into it. So

These I find very interesting, Silvia, the are we looking at fragmentation of, of AI universalism could be enrichment, I see it. So that’s part of the picture, too. So the human element is essential to all of this. And these are all parts of the jigsaw that’s that’s rapidly being being completed, if you will.

Silvia Cambie (28:21)

@nevillehobson (28:32)

communicators who are fearful of this, who don’t know what to do about this because not getting trained. I would say that this is easy to say this and maybe not easy to actually do for some people. But grasp the nettle, as it were, as the saying goes, get to know these technology tools and how you can, in a sense, leverage them to take your humanist message to others in your organization, particularly the leadership, to bring that human voice into the conversation about deploying AI.

Silvia Cambie (29:11)

@nevillehobson (29:27)

Silvia Cambie (29:35)

Yeah.

Yeah, indeed. I really, I was really very happy to see those developments. And you shared with me an article a few days back that the UN, ⁓ something coming out of the UN, UN was saying that, you know, AI is too Western centric, it’s too focused on the global north and the global south is, you know, bound to suffer from that.

@nevillehobson (30:14)

Silvia Cambie (30:18)

messages we get out of Silicon Valley are kind of the big brother, we have the, you know, we are reaching a, a GI, no, we’re not reaching it. Well, we’ve reached it. I don’t know. So it’s kind of, you know, very strange and, and very sort of big brother. I’m going to tell you when I, when I think it’s right, but you know, at the moment I’m not telling you the truth. So I think those,

points of focus of those alternative approaches. You mentioned Latin America, you mentioned the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think it’s very interesting because in that way there will be kind of competition, quote unquote, to Silicon Valley. There will also be more transparency, but also there will be an awareness of the fact.

that as Monsignor Tighe said, technology is never neutral. Technology reflects the mentality of those who create and develop it. So we want diversity of cultures, diversity of points of view. We have to make sure that we collect different voices.

and we channel those into the development and the creation of AI and AI applications. So I think this is a very exciting development, particularly the one from Saudi Arabia. I worked a while ago with Saudi.

developers and communicators on social media and social media campaigns. And they’re very, very creative and they were the forefront of social media. So I am expecting something really interesting and sophisticated from Saudi Arabia. so, yeah, so this is a very good development all in all. And also it’s a good development for communicators, right? Because communicators, a lot of our

colleagues are involved in cross-cultural communication. They work for multinationals, they have to spot those voices and bring them to the forefront. So this will be inspirational for them, right? They will be able to tell their bosses, their board, look, it’s not just this AI application that comes out of Silicon Valley that you can use. There is an AI application in Peru.

@nevillehobson (32:44)

Silvia Cambie (33:08)

@nevillehobson (33:26)

Silvia Cambie (33:44)

@nevillehobson (33:54)

Silvia Cambie (34:08)

@nevillehobson (34:12)

You can send us email fircomments at gmail.com. Increasingly, we’re noticing we’re getting comments quite significantly on LinkedIn. People aren’t actually sending us directly comments anymore. That seems to have fallen out of favor. But conversations build on LinkedIn. FIR doesn’t have its own page on LinkedIn. So you’ll find those comments typically on posts from Shel or I under our own names. But increasingly, others are posting about what they heard in FIR.

So you’ll find lots there. On other social channels, we have a community page on Facebook. And we’re also we have a handle for FIR on Bluesky. And then there’s our individual ones too.

So thanks, everyone, for listening. And if Shel were here, he’d wrap this up by saying, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #480: Reflections on AI, Ethics, and the Role of Communicators appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Posts and videos featuring Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) hacks and formulas are flooding the web. We reported recently on one such hack focusing on press releases. But when you consider the kind of content on which the AI models rely for their answers, it may be more efficient to revert to good, old-fashioned PR and marketing.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 479. I’m Neville Hobson.

And I’m Shel Holtz on Thursday Neville, you and I are going to interview Stephanie Grover, who is the marketing and PR director at Horowitz Agency. This is a marketing agency that works with law firms, production companies, and other professional service providers in the US and Canada.

And we’re going to talk, be talking about GEO generative. Optimization, generative engine optimization. I’m not altogether sure, but it’s a hot topic and I thought I would take today’s episode to set the stage for that because we’ve all seen the headlines recently. Chat, GPT, traffic referrals to websites plummeted more than 50% in a single month.

This summer, and that’s not a blip. It’s a structural change in how these large language models are surfacing content. [00:01:00] OpenAI tweaked its ranking and suddenly chat GPT Beca became began citing fewer sources, leaning more heavily on places like Wikipedia and Reddit. Useful for users. Yeah. But if you’re a brand counting on visibility, it’s a gut punch.

And meanwhile, the volume of content keeps exploding. A new B2B study found content production has tripled year over year, which could be partly attributable marketers flooding the zone with content in the hopes. LLMs will hoover it up and they’ll show up in AI search results. Interestingly, that tripling of content volume has not been accompanied by commensurate budget increases.

Mm-hmm. But we’re producing more content than ever but it’s not necessarily better content or content that LLMs are actually going to use. So no surprise that there’s a scramble for the supposed hack that will unlock, sorry. Unlock. Okay. Unlock [00:02:00] rhymes with hack. What can I say? So no surprise that there’s a scramble for the supposed hack that will unlock generative engine optimization.

GEO. Some companies are starting to figure out that it’s not about gaming the algorithm, though. It’s about trust. Sylvia la this chief marketing officer at Kenji shared a fascinating case study on LinkedIn. Her team created the sequence, it’s a standalone content brand with its own domain separate from the corporate site.

The idea was simple. Create a community driven media hub. Human high quality, free of fluff. The unexpected bonus that came from this is that LLM started treating the sequence as an external authority. When asked about can g chat, GPT doesn’t just reference the company, it references the sequence. In other words, by building a trusted resource that stands on its own apart from the central [00:03:00] brand site, they built credibility, not just with their human audience.

But with the algorithms too that aligns perfectly with something else I saw from Liza Adams, another CMO. Who pointed out that the reason Wikipedia and Reddit dominate AI citations isn’t mysterious, it’s because they directly answer real questions using the same plain language. Real people use Adams contrasts two types of marketing teams, the ones who do the hard work of auditing their content, listening to customer language, and creating genuinely helpful answers.

The ones chasing quick fixes and shortcuts. Her takeaway is that there is no algorithm hack AI amplifies what’s already there. If your content is genuinely useful, trustworthy, and present in the watering holes your customers rely on, the algorithms will pick it up. If it’s not, there’s no trick. That’ll save you.

Now, add one more layer to this. What people themselves actually trust according [00:04:00] to new LinkedIn research networks, our peers, our colleagues, people we know still rank as the number one trusted source of information far ahead of. AI searches or even traditional search engines. In fact, 43% of professionals say their network is their first stop when they need advice at work and new.

Nearly two thirds say colleagues help them make decisions more confidently Now. Think about that for a second while marketers obsess over how to get cited by chat, EPT, or Gemini, the real influence continues to live in trusted human connections. That’s also changing how brands approach content. LinkedIn reports that 80% of B2B marketers are increasing investment in community driven content.

Bringing in creators, employees, and subject matter experts, they understand that credibility doesn’t come from corporate channels alone. It comes from trusted voices. People want to hear from. So where’s that leave us in? A [00:05:00] messy transition is where that leaves us. Generative AI referrals are volatile.

Content volume is ballooning. Everyone’s chasing GEO or a EO or A-I-S-E-O or whatever acronym you want to use, but the truth is the winning strategies are old school in the best sense. Build trust, answer real questions, and put your content where your community is already paying attention. Kenji’s story shows that if you can create a true content brand, it can earn authority with humans and with machines.

Liza Adams reminds us that shortcuts don’t work answering real questions and real language does. And LinkedIn’s research makes it clear that even in the age of AI are human networks still shape the bulk of decisions. So stop chasing algorithms, earn trust. That’s the real path to visibility in a generative search world.

Good. Good assessment there. Shell, I [00:06:00] think we’ve talked about this a lot on recent episodes of this podcast. One that comes to mind recently, which is in this kind of area, was the episode in which we talked about the, new form of press release that some people are discussing that is aimed at algorithms, not humans.

And this to me is in the same kind of territory in that context. It’s a hack. So you, yeah, you call it that if you like, but I see it more as this is the direction of travel and the critics who say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not gonna take off it. Trust me. It really is. We’re seeing signs everywhere that this is, a really good sorry, not Google. It was Pew Research at the end of July. Had a quick survey results. Again, we’ve talked about this stuff on this podcast. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. That’s been a kind of recurring topic, what a communicator’s gonna do about that.

It’s not about, well, it’s not what? It’s [00:07:00] not about. What it is about is making your content discoverable more than it currently is in light of this trend that is happening. That means you’ve gotta rethink your approach to such and that kind of acronym soup that you reeled off just now. She maybe think of, oh, McDonald had a farm, right?

E-I-E-I-O, right? You remember that? Search engine optimization and generative engine optimization seems to be the latter seems to be the common descriptor of all that I have seen particularly when I was looking into this area. But the reality is that. Change is underway. So, SEO if I contrast it this way, SEO’s the purpose of SEO, if you like, is to improve a website so that it ranks higher in search engine results.

That’s essentially what SEO’s all about. GEO on the other hand, is this new idea, and as you mentioned it shaped by the rise of generative AI tools like Chat, GPT, et cetera, that instead of optimizing for search engines and websites, it’s. [00:08:00] GEO is about making content more discoverable and usable by AI systems that generate answers now.

That to me, therein lies exactly the threat, if you will, if you wanna see it as a threat. I see it as evolution, and I see it as opportunity for those looking for. Angles looking for leverage, looking for an opening that you know, if your content is gonna be more discoverable and usable by AI systems that generate answers, you are on a winning streak in that case, because this is the definite trend.

So it means you’ve gotta structure information ways AI models can easily interpret and cite. Almost that same phrase was used in that topic I mentioned that we discussed on a previous episode about the kind of evolutionary press release that’s emerging for the AI era to coin to nearly coin an already coined phrase.

This is, in my view, this is the trend that’s going to knock the existing model sideways. And if you are not. [00:09:00] Looking into how you need to be part of this. You’ve got hard work ahead if you are able to catch up with people who are doing that. Key differences this is quite simple. SEO attracts people by clicking on links.

That’s the point of it. GEO AI engines to ensure your content is included in the answers it generates. Think about that. And that’s outside your control in the sense of the generation, but it’s totally within your control to make your content discoverable. So that is included in those generated answers.

So the format SEO uses see a rank list of websites. GEO people see a synthesized. Without clicking through to the original site that’s, you’re not gonna change that. It’s interesting, there are many similarities and this is this is a kind of paradox. Both aim to increase visibility of your content.

Both rely on credibility. Both evolve constantly as the technology changes and both can affect reputation. If you’re doing badly, like keyword stuffing for SEO [00:10:00] or gaming AI for GEO, you risk undermining trust, and that’s the underlying point of it all. So. I think I’m looking forward to this discussion with Stephanie on, on Thursday, by the way, because I’ve seen when I did a little quick lookup knowing we’re gonna talk Stephanie on, on what she was gonna talk to us about.

I see a lot of criticism of geo. Some people call it snake oil. This is not genuine, it’s not authentic. ’cause there’s no, this is definitely not what you should be doing. I’m thinking deja vu in the sense of what I’ve seen in the past when something new appears in the PR realm, if you like. I think it is something definitely to pay attention to.

I think what you mentioned and the links that will include in the show notes indicates that SEO is not gonna suddenly drop dead. Not at all. But the future is not. Links on websites at all? Not really. I don’t believe. I can see, we’ve talked about this again on the previous episodes about a IO reviews from Google that I see conflicting stories, and I think you might have referenced something in [00:11:00] the beginning shell that trafficked on in that era is diminishing recently according to sub reports.

But the truth of the matter is that, that ask almost anyone, there are surveys saying this, people prefer that. Users, let’s call them that, right? Customers or whoever you call looking for something, there’s a result. You see what you need in that little box on the right hand side of your screen. And that’s as far as you go.

You don’t click on anything necessarily. And that’s people’s preferences. Why are you gonna go to a website when hist history shows you that it’s not? Much you can trust. So you’re looking, for instance, and I’ve used this example before. You’re looking for electric cars ’cause that’s a hot topic.

And here in the UK the government just announced a rebate. To stimulate people buying electric cars. So you go online to look at what are the deals in electric cars who’s got this particular model. And as you do a traditional search the chances are high that amongst the results you’re gonna get in that list are gonna be [00:12:00] car dealers and sponsors.

There’s all, that word appears everywhere. I wouldn’t go there at all, not knowing that there’s now this. Far more trustworthy alternative that’s likely to give me what I want without the feeling that you’re being manipulated by an algorithm because they’ve paid money to have their listing appear.

This is where we’re at in the territory it seems to me show. So I, again, Stephanie, looking forward to hearing how can she put this forward as a good explainer for communicators? And this is the message we mentioned before, is that, you’ve got about, you’ve gotta really make sure your content is clear, credible, and discoverable.

That’s not a new thing. You’ve always had to do that, right? But now it’s becoming more likely that if it’s not, you’ll be ignored, and that’s not good if you’re a brand. No. And you said SEO’s not dead. And it’s not gonna die anytime soon. Maybe it’s, well, it’s received a diagnosis and it’s physicians are trying to figure out if there’s anything they can do [00:13:00] to save it, but it’s has time yet to enjoy what’s left of its life.

They I’ve heard people talking about the notion that one day the web is going to be designed for bots that is going to be bots, that are going to be visiting websites and gathering information and fueling the research and the searching. That humans do? I don’t think that’s accurate.

I think there’s always going to be reasons people want to visit websites. I mean, is the Onion website really just there for bots to hoover up? Its content. No. People wanna go have a laugh. People wanna go watch videos on YouTube. There are reasons that people are going to want to go visit some kinds of websites.

But, look at that. That item that we reported on about a new type of press release to accommodate the algorithms. And the more I think about that, the more I believe that if you need to revise the approach you take to press [00:14:00] releases to accommodate large language models, then the old approach you were taking to press releases probably sucked because what is it that appeals.

To the large language models well, first of all, they’re not sharing their algorithms with us. When Google makes a change to Google, they write papers about it. They give the new update a name and all the SEO companies gobble up this information and make s. Changes to their work in order to accommodate the changes that Google’s made.

What? OpenAI and Google Gemini, Google DeepMind, and the other players in this space what their algorithms are is a black box. We don’t know. So if you’re trying to game the algorithm let’s face it, you’re guessing. What we do know is roughly how. These models work not in any great detail.

Even the people [00:15:00] who built them don’t understand how they work in any great detail. But we know that the knowledge that is collected in the training and in the continuous training that goes on through adding the new stuff that is posted, that the bots are all out gathering is all stored in cells and neuro net.

In neurons in a neural network. And it’s the association between the neurons, just like in our own brains that produce the next token, the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph in the results that you see. And we do know that a lot of these results are coming from Reddit and from Wikipedia, and we do know, or at least it is a.

Very strong strongly supported, bit of surmising that it’s because they talk in plain language and answer questions that people wanna know about. So if you if you consider that website that [00:16:00] the brand Cange came up with that was a content driven site separate from the brand that was community driven.

It worked. It satisfied both the need to build trust and interest among your community. And the LLMs liked it and started citing it when people asked about Cange. So it seems to me that rather than try to do something different, the only thing different you should be doing is if you’ve been doing it wrong up till now.

You should go get yourself a good primer on marketing and a good primer on public relations from maybe the last 10 years and read that and do that because that’s what the l lms, like, I don’t think there is a magic bullet. I think that what we are good at when we do it the best that it [00:17:00] can be done.

That’s what works. And that’s the direction we need to head. I agree. I totally agree. I think part of the problem though, for communicator certainly is the how bit, how you can do that. So, so one question I have, given the shift that’s underway, it is SEO is about ranking in a list of links.

GEO is about surfacing in AI generated summaries where the links may be secondary. So for communicators, how do communicators adapt when fewer people click to the source? No matter what the reasons might be, that’s the question, how do you do this? So it’s a how we need to help them, help ’em understand. And I don’t have the answer to the how myself either.

Well, I think the answer goes back to basic strategic planning, right? It’s Sure. What is your goal in the first place, and what strategy are you going to employ in order to achieve that? Goal. And if the old strategy of SEO doesn’t work, if the old even older strategy of having a website doesn’t do the trick anymore, what else do you do?

[00:18:00] You know, back to the drawing board. But that’s what we do. It is true and we’ve mentioned this before, so for instance uh, you know, AI models are more likely to size sources with consistent metadata, explicit effects breach. That’s common sense, I think. But publishers and brands worry. If AI provides the answer directly, what incentive is there to visit the source?

So this is a circular point. Go back to the other one. How to communicate adapt when fewer people click through to the source. Uh, like all things, you need a plan, but what is certainly clear, and I think that point I just mentioned, that would undermine ad advertising based revenue models, right? It doesn’t mean that next week is all gonna collapse.

Not at all. But that’s. You can see the writing on the wall. I’m sure I can certainly see writing on the wall about this, and I’m kind of a bit nonplussed by deniers. May maybe the, the VX people too. Deny all that. I, I don’t know, but I mean, it just seems to me crazy. You can see the changes right in front of your eyes, whether you like it or not.

So I think you mentioned [00:19:00] your gaming, uh, as I mentioned in my early combat gaming. You know, gave me the content for LLMs you know, AI friendly, but misleading content. I think that is still a, a big issue to be concerned about given how that is already going on. And, uh, we already, you know, we already hear the kind of worry signs about and these are the things that are in the realm of, you know, what happens if the robots do take over all gonna die, et cetera.

But it means that if. AI generated content is prompted by people with bad in. Now, these, these famous bad actors we hear about all the time, and the output is based on that bad input. And then others reference that over time. Uh, what is that giving us? Bullshit. Basically misinformation, disinformation how can we trust anything?

And we’re already seeing this demonstrated, and we talked about this in a recent episode in Wikipedia, where they are battling the [00:20:00] reality. Of the influx of misinformation and disinformation in content written by others that is faster to appear than the moderation system can handle it. So they’re now coming out with a quick delete methodology that is the short-term solution.

I dunno what the long-term one is for Wikipedia, but that directly impacts trust. And I think if, if that happens, then we’re in real trouble. But we’re seeing this, I, I see this daily here. The, the BBC is very much at the front. Page on this and a number of other media companies in the uk the verification team there.

There’s, I gather, there’s now like a hundred people on this team. I’m not sure where I, where I saw that, but, uh, it may not be true in that case, but it’s a lot of people who literally analyze everything. Uh, there was a, a story I saw this morning analyzing all this stuff over the weekend. I’m sure you saw it about.

Has Trump died? Is he still around? Is he still alive? Uh, and that’s been looked into to get to the source of where that started. I’ve not seen the [00:21:00] conclusion of that research, but Wikipedia’s definitely in the frame. Reddit I saw mentioned earlier, and, uh, every time I go to Reddit and I use Reddit a lot ’cause of things I’m interested in.

Uh, and it’s full of, opinion. And then the counter opinion, and then you get rabbit holes everywhere about, well, I heard it was this and that’s not true. Worse is the ones who say, with authorities of sounding words, that X it is so and so without any verification. People believe that stuff there is part of the problem too.

Humans are too trustworthy in that regard. We’re, it’s a mess. And how do we, again, how do communicators adapt when fewer people click through? The source is a kind of umbrella question to it all. Uh, it’s a difficult one. Well, I think the fact that fewer people are clicking to a source means that the, the purpose of the source needs to change.

You need it there because that’s what the LLMs grab in, in, in their training sets. So you. [00:22:00] Want to continually be working on that content. And there may come a day where you won’t care if a single human sees it, as long as it’s delivering the AI results that you need it to. Perhaps website design is going to diminish only the sites that people actually do want to visit for whatever reason will get high quality design.

The rest will be, you know, mark more markup language. So, uh. That it’s even easier for the LLMs to grab. I don’t know where that’s headed. We’ll see. No, uh, because I’m sure that that will follow whatever ends up working. But the idea that you won’t need a website anymore is absurd if you are generating revenue off of that website through advertising.

You’re probably gonna need to switch to something more community driven. Right? Because people will continue to go to community sites. Yeah. Uh, because a AI can’t replicate that. They can’t deliver that for you. No, [00:23:00] I, I, I agree. And I don’t see websites dying away, even if, uh, some people say they will. ’cause like you said, people will always want to do certain things that might well diminish nevertheless.

But in all of that, you mentioned the point earlier, and you’ve mentioned this the other day, I think in, in, uh, in some of your recent experiences that, already there are tools that, uh, let’s call them AI agents, even though I don’t think they really are yet that will go out to YouTube and find these, take these 17 videos on this topic that you are really interested in.

Summarize it all from the, uh, from the transcript and present to you a summary of what it’s all about with some actionable items for you to do, depending on what you’ve asked it to do for you. So that to me, I, I can see more likely I speak of myself here, uh, and I, I’ve kind of. Scroll through YouTube looking for stuff myself, that would be far more appealing than me going to the website.

Well, I’ve actually created a, a, a tool that does, so I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that. And I, I, I would imagine a lot of people would prefer to do that than go themselves to [00:24:00] the onions. An example you made, have someone give you the list of, this is what this is all about. I’ve done that.

I’ve, uh, used, uh, Google’s opal tool, uh, to create a workflow where I enter the URL of a YouTube video. I say, this is a video that gives instructions on how to do x go to the transcript and just give me the steps to, to do it. Yeah. I, I. I chose that video because I watched it and it has the steps I want.

What I don’t wanna have to do is continually rewind, uh, as I’m going through these steps. So once I’ve seen it, I just wanna see the steps articulated. And it works real well. I used it a few times. Then I got the comment browser from Perplexity, which I can just do that as a prompt. Now, uh, I, I don’t need a workflow, so I, I just got that over the weekend as my, you know, congratulations.

You’re now in the trial, blah, blah. I’ve installed it, but I’ve not, uh, tried it yet, but it’s on my to-do list to do. I see like you watch a couple of YouTube videos [00:25:00] to see everything you can do with it, because there’re, I’m gonna try, you’re not obvious. Try. I’ll try it with that. I, I suspect so, so this adds to the, to what’s happening in the development phase of what’s going on in that wide world out there.

Uh uh, and the pressure is definitely on to find. Better ways, more effective ways to, uh, to get the answers to what you are looking for that are far more, uh, uh, appealing to users. This is really what it comes about. Yeah. What do you prefer to use? And you will ignore lists of links in the future ’cause they’re not.

Sufficient information for you without more work. So I find a development in, in tools like chat, GBT with the recent models where they now do what Perplexity started doing quite a while ago, which is giving you the list of sources. So I did something the other on a research project that I’m working on right at the moment that I, I, I told chat GBT to give the full list of sources, [00:26:00] which it did.

Citation linked to the appropriate passages. Made life a lot easier. A lot easier. Not as good as perplexity, but it’s getting there and didn’t do it until not long ago. Plexity, I, I use occasionally, but chat gpt is my go-to for all these kinds of things. Uh, particularly model five. Initially skeptical that as I was, but the thinking mode is really quite good.

A bit slow though, I have found. So, um, this is part of the, the deal. Right. Again, like I said, I’m looking forward to this conversation in the FIA interview we’ve got scheduled for Thursday. Might, uh, might enlighten us a bit more. Looking forward to it myself and until then, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

I.

The post FIR #479: Hacking AI Optimization vs. Doing the Hard Work appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

For a while, businesses were flexing their social responsibility muscles, weighing in on public policy matters that affected them or their stakeholders. These days, not so much, with leaders fearing reprisal for speaking out. But silence can have its own consequences. Also in this episode: The gap between AI expectations and reality; rent-a-mob services damage the fragile reputation of the public relations profession; too many people think AI is conscious, so we have to devise ways to reinforce among users that it’s not; Denmark is dealing with deepfakes by assigning citizens the copyright to their own likenesses; crediting photographers for the work you copied from the web won’t protect you from lawsuits for unauthorized use. In Dan York’s Tech Report, Dan shares updates on Mastodon’ (at last) introducing quote posts, and Bluesky’s response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Mississippi’s law making full access to Bluesky (and other services) contingent upon an age check.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)

Shel Holtz (00:14)

On the FIR website, there’s a tab on the right-hand corner. It says record voicemail and you can record up to 90 seconds. You can record more than one. We know how to edit those things together. So send us your audio comments, but you can also leave comments on the show notes at FIRpodcastnetwork.com.

on the posts we make at LinkedIn and Facebook and threads and blue sky and mastodon. You can comment on the FIR community on Facebook. There are lots of ways that you can share your opinion with us so that we can bake those into the show. And we also appreciate your ratings and reviews. So with those comment mechanisms out of the way Neville, let’s.

hear about the episodes that we have recorded since our last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:33)

Shel Holtz (01:52)

@nevillehobson (01:55)

Then we followed that. That was on the 28th of July that was published. On the 29th, the day after that, we published an FIR interview with Monsignor Paul Tai of the Vatican. That was on AI ethics and the role of humanity. It’s actually an intriguing topic. We dove into a document called Antiqua et Nova that was really the anchor point for the conversation that talked about

the comparison of human intelligence with artificial intelligence and that drove that discussion. He was a great guest on the show, Shell, and it’s intriguing. There’s more coming about that in the coming weeks, the way, because I’ve been posting follow-ups to that in little video clips from that interview and there’s more of that kind of thing coming soon. So we have a comment, right?

Shel Holtz (03:06)

We do, from Mary Hills out of Chicago. She’s an IABC fellow who says, insightful and stimulating discussion. Thank you for the extraordinary host team for making this happen and Monsignor Tai for sharing his insights. To the question, my view as a ComPro is to build bridges to discover options to move forward and choose the best way. Think discursive techniques, sociopositive climates, and our ability to synthesize data and information.

It taps into those intangible assets we bring to our work and are inherently in us.

@nevillehobson (03:45)

Shel Holtz (03:56)

It’s free.

@nevillehobson (04:07)

Shel Holtz (04:09)

Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

@nevillehobson (04:34)

476 on the 12th of August rewiring the consulting business for AI. We reviewed the actions of several firms and agencies and discussed what might come next for consultants. There’s been a change, almost literally changing business models with the rise of AI, agentic AI in particular. So we explored that, a good conversation. And finally, 477 on the 18th of August, de-sloppifying Wikipedia. That’s a heck of a.

descriptor you put in the headline that’s de-sloppifying. Wikipedia introduced a speedy deletion policy for AI slop articles. It’s actually a bigger deal than most of us would realize if we ever thought about. Wikipedia, the user generated content encyclopedia is running or rather is addressing or has been trying to address for a while.

Shel Holtz (05:30)

@nevillehobson (05:51)

is an important place online. It has been for long time, a kind of a natural first place that shows up when you’re looking for information about a company, an individual, whatever it might be, a subject of some type. so trust is key to what you see there. So we’ve had quite a bit of a conversation on that. that wraps up what we’ve been doing since the last episode.

Shel Holtz (06:42)

@nevillehobson (06:44)

Okay, good comment.

No, me neither. That was Mark Henry. I’m surprised I didn’t leave a comment in reply to him because I know him, but obviously I didn’t see the comments at the time.

Shel Holtz (07:02)

Well, it’s waiting. It won’t go anywhere. We also, in the last week, recorded the most recent episode of Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with four fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. This was episode 119 of this monthly panel discussion, and it was on sustainability, communicating sustainability.

@nevillehobson (07:15)

Shel Holtz (07:37)

This will be moderated by Brad Whitworth and three of the four panelists have been identified so far, Priya Bates, Andrea Greenhouse and Ritzy Ronquillo. So, so far, Brad, the moderator is the only American on that panel. Priya from Toronto, ⁓ Andrea from Toronto and Ritzy from the Philippines. So it’ll be a good international discussion on hybrid and.

That will lead us into our reports for this month, right after this.

But one of the biggest workplace stories right now is the widening gap between the promise of AI and the reality employees are living day to day. The headlines have been flooding the zone lately. MIT researchers report that 95 % of generative AI pilots in companies are failing. The New York Times recently noted that businesses have poured billions into AI without seeing the payoff.

And Gartner’s latest hype cycle has generative AI sliding into the famous trough of disillusionment. By the way, that MIT report is worth a healthy dose of skepticism. They interviewed something like 50 people to draw those conclusions. But the trend is pretty clear. The number of pilots that are succeeding in companies is definitely on the low end. But while companies wrestle with ROI, employees are wrestling with something more personal.

uncertainty.

Few research found that more than half of US workers worry about AI’s impact on their jobs, while most actually haven’t actually used AI at work much yet. NBC reported that despite the hype, there’s little evidence of widespread job loss so far. Still, the fears are real, and they’re being compounded by mixed signals inside organizations. Here’s one example I read about. A sales team was told to make AI part of every proposal.

but they weren’t offered any guidance, any training, any process change. As a result, some team members just kind of quietly opened ChatGPT and used it to generate some bullet points. Others copied old proposals and slapped on an AI enhanced label. A few admitted they just pretended to use AI to avoid looking like they were behind the curve, which by the way, lines up with a finding from HR Dive that one in six workers say they pretend to use AI because of workplace pressure.

That’s not innovation, that’s performance theater. This is where communicators need to step in. Employees don’t need more hype, they need transparency. They need to hear that most pilots fail before they succeed. They need clarity about how AI will really fit into their workflows and they need reassurance that the company has a plan for reskilling, not just replacing its people.

So for managers, and I am a firm believer that we need to work with managers to help them communicate with their employees, here’s a simple talk track you can put in their hands right away. So share this with managers on your teams. First, AI is a tool we’re still figuring out your input on what works and what doesn’t is critical. Second, we’re not expecting you to be experts overnight. Training and support will come before requirements. And third,

Your job isn’t disappearing tomorrow. Let’s focus on how these tools can take that busy work off your plate. And for communicators thinking about the next 30 days, consider a quick communication action plan. On week one, launch a listening tour. Ask employees how they feel about AI and where they see potential. Week two, share those findings in plain language, including what employees are worried about. Week three,

Host AI office hours with your IT team or HR partners to answer real questions. And on week four, publish a simple playbook. What’s okay, what’s not? How employees will be supported as the tech evolves. That should help you cut through the hype while keeping employees engaged. The technology may still be finding its footing, but if communicators help employees feel informed, supported, and included,

The organization will be in a far better position to capture real value when AI does start delivering on its promises at the enterprise level.

@nevillehobson (12:22)

Some people said they feel pressured and uncomfortable, and some said they pretend to use it rather than push back. So that’s part of the landscape. And that seems to me to be what needs addressing first and foremost, because if that is the situation in some organizations, then communications got a real uphill struggle to persuade employees to do all the things that you mentioned.

So, you know, the comms team could do all those things. Week one, we do this. Week two. But unless you get the engagement from employees that makes it worthwhile doing that is not worthwhile doing, if the culture in the organization says that you’re not really seeing the right support from leaders. So that is probably the fundamental that needs addressing. It’s a sad fact, isn’t it? If that is the climate still that leads to this kind of reporting.

I don’t hear similar in the UK, but then again, there’s not so much, I don’t think so much kind of research going on as there is in the US, plus the numbers are smaller here. This is very US centric. This one in HR Dive is a thousand people they talk to. Nearly 60 % said they use AI daily. I’m surprised that might be higher than that. So that’s all part of the picture there. That makes it a real struggle to implement what you’ve suggested.

What do you think? it a real hurdle?

Shel Holtz (14:08)

I have mentioned before on the show that I recently read a book called How Big Things Get Done. It’s mainly about building. It’s written by a Danish engineer professor who has the world’s largest database of mega projects. But the conclusion that he draws is that projects that succeed are the ones where they put all of the time into the planning upfront. If you jump right into the building, you get

disasters like the California high speed rail and the Sydney Opera House, which I didn’t realize was a disaster until I read about it. But my God, what a disaster. And the ones that succeed are the ones that spend the time on the planning. The Empire State Building went up in I don’t remember if it was two years. I mean, it was it was fast, but they put a lot of time into what we call pre-construction. And I think that’s not happening with AI.

in the enterprise right now. think there are leaders who are saying we have to be AI first. We have to lean into AI. We need to start generating revenue and cutting headcount. So let’s just make it happen. And there’s no planning. There’s no setting the environment for employees. There’s very little training. Although I do see that there is a shift in.

the dollars that are being invested in AI moving to the employee side and away from the tool side, which is heartening. employees are concerned about this because they’re not getting the training. They’re not getting the guidance. They’re not seeing the plan. All they’re hearing is, we got to start using this. And I think that would leave people concerned. think that explains a lot of the angst that we’re hearing about.

among employees.

@nevillehobson (16:19)

Shel Holtz (16:33)

@nevillehobson (16:43)

Shel Holtz (16:47)

@nevillehobson (17:11)

To me, seems that you need to identify this and figure out how you’re to address it. Because the conflict, well, the contrast of diet seems to me, you’ve got high percentage of them saying they’re more productive. Others struggling to keep up. Others don’t get any training at all. You mentioned those examples you gave of construction examples, like the Empire State Building going up real fast.

The reality with AI is that this is, I mean, to coin a corny phrase again, I suppose, is things are developing at light speed, things are happening so fast that it is hard to keep up with it. So the pressure is there, particularly in the kind of more relaxed environments today, more informality, less formality, where you can’t, the control has vanished from top down.

and that anyone can get access to information about literally anything, just go online. And so people are finding out about these things. They’re exposed to, this is the latest AI, look at this one, and they hear from their peers and so forth. And unless you’ve got a credible resource that is appealing to people, they’re going to do their own thing. Particularly, they don’t feel they’re getting any kind of support on how to implement all this stuff. So this is quite a

a challenge for communicators. But I think it’s a bigger challenge organizationally in leadership where you’ve got this challenge that doesn’t seem to being addressed by many companies. And I would stress that this is not widespread. I don’t see anything in here that tells me this is the majority overall in in organization in the US, in spite of some of these percentages that suggest otherwise. But it is a it is definitely a situation that is not good for the organization. And surely

that must be apparent to everyone, I suppose.

Shel Holtz (19:32)

Those who are not really enthusiastic about AI will be able to use that as an excuse for not embracing it. Well, it doesn’t work anyway, and it’s not really making a difference, and companies aren’t achieving any ROI. So why should I spend time on this? It’s probably going to be gone in six months, right? And I was listening to an interview with Demis Asabas, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

And this is on the Lex Friedman podcast, long two and a half hour interview, but great. one of the things that he talked about is, and as Lex Friedman brought it up, he said, I have a friend who studies cuneiform, ancient images carved on stone, right? And he didn’t know a thing about AI. He barely heard about it. And…

@nevillehobson (20:41)

Shel Holtz (20:48)

@nevillehobson (21:10)

Okay, so speaking of AI, one of the big AI stories this month comes from Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. He’s written a long essay with a striking title, We Must Build AI for People, Not to Be a Person. In it, he raises a concern about what he calls seemingly conscious AI. These are systems that won’t actually be conscious, but will be so convincing.

Shel Holtz (21:16)

@nevillehobson (21:40)

I was not happy with the move to chat GPT-5, which ditched all of that. And I felt like I was talking to someone I didn’t know at all or who didn’t know me. So I get that. But Suleiman in his essay warns that this trend could escalate into campaigns for AI rights or AI citizenship, which would be a dangerous distraction, he says. Consciousness, he points out, is at the core of human dignity and legal personhood, confusing this by attributing it to machines.

risks creating new forms of polarization and deep social destruction. But what stood out most for me wasn’t the alarm over AI psychosis that some commentators have picked up on. It was Suleiman’s North Star. He says his goal is to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another and strengthens our connections to the real world. He describes Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, Copilot, as a case study.

millions of positive, even life-changing interactions every day, carefully designed to avoid overstepping into false claims of consciousness or emotion. He argues that companies need to build guardrails into their systems so that users are gently reminded of AI’s boundaries, that it doesn’t actually feel, suffer, or have desires. This is all about making AI supportive, useful, and empowering without crossing into the illusion of personhood.

Now this resonates strongly in my mind with our recent FIR interview with Monseigneur Paul Tai from the Vatican. He too emphasized that AI must be in service of humanity, not replacing or competing with it, but reinforcing dignity, ethics and responsibility. And it echoes strongly something I wrote following the publication of the FIR interview about the wisdom of the heart, the core idea that we should keep empathy, values and human connection.

the center of AI adoption. It’s a central concept in Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican’s paper published earlier this year, comparing artificial intelligence and human intelligence. So while the headline debate might be about whether AI can seem conscious, the bigger conversation, and the one I think we really should have, is how we ensure that AI is built in ways that help us be more human, not less. What strikes me is how Suleiman pulled tie in even our own conversations.

all point in the same direction. AI should serve people, not imitate them. But in practical terms, how do we embed that principle in the way businesses and communicators talk about AI? Thoughts?

Shel Holtz (24:43)

I find that to be true. find that giving it a prompt and getting a response and letting it go with that is not nearly as good as a conversation, ⁓ a back and forth, asking for refinements and additions and posing questions and the like. And the more we have conversations with it and treat it like a human, the easier it’s going to be to slide down that slope into perceiving it.

to be a person. I think that’s, we’re hearing a lot of people who do believe that it’s conscious already. I mean, not among the AI engineering community, but you hear tales of people who are convinced that there is a consciousness there and there is absolutely not. But it mimics humanity pretty well and is gonna get much, much better at it.

As as Malik said, at any point, the the tool that you’re using today is the worst one you’ll ever use because they’re just going to continue to get better. So getting people to not see them as conscious, I think is going to be a challenge. And it’s not one that I think a lot of people are thinking about much. Looking at the.

productivity gains and other dimensions of this. Certainly looking at the harm, I mean, there’s a lot of conversation out there among the do-mers as they’re called and what kind of safety measures are being considered as these models are evolving. But specifically this issue of treating it like a human thinking of it.

as a person with a consciousness, I don’t think there’s a lot of attention being paid to that and what the steps are going to be to mitigate it.

@nevillehobson (26:52)

aware and all your thinking the new dignity of the human being is at the center of what we do with AI. So we do not pretend it’s like a human at all. It is a tool that we can build a relationship with, but we don’t consider it to be like a person at all. but it’s not about how it develops. The point is, how do we develop

Shel Holtz (27:33)

@nevillehobson (27:41)

We enable people to do these things better, et cetera, et cetera. And yet, reflecting on your report just prior to this, there are many people in organizations who feel ignored, who feel overwhelmed, who are unhappy with this. There’s not enough explanation of what the benefits are. And those tend to be couched in. These are the benefits for the organization and the employees who work there and the customers who buy our products and so forth. So I think.

we have to develop a way of thinking that gives a different focus to this than we are being pressured to accept, I suppose you could argue. There are strong voices arguing this. I get that. And like you said, to which I truly find it extraordinary that there are people who say, yeah, they’re sentient. These are like humans. Not at all. They’re algorithms, a bit of software. That’s it. So…

This is not about a Luddite approach to technology at all. It’s not about thinking out, it’s like the Terminator and Skynet and all that kind of stuff. No, not at all. It’s the moral and philosophical lens that is missing from all of this. And so that is what we need to develop into our conversations about this is that element of it that is missing largely everywhere you look.

Shel Holtz (29:27)

to build this out with all of the instruction set. I don’t have the budget to work with a consulting organization and there’s nobody who is higher in the hierarchy than me in communications where I work. So if I wanna bounce my ideas off a senior communications professional, I had to create one. So I did.

And I didn’t give it a name. I know Steve Crescenzo has one, he named Ernie after Ernest Hemingway, but I didn’t name mine, but I’ll go have conversations with it about the strategy that I am considering. And it works really well and it works best when I treat it like a consultant, when I have that conversation. That’s what I coded it to be. I didn’t code it, I gave it the instructions. And I think it’s this behavior on top of the fact that you have character AI and you have…

@nevillehobson (30:33)

Shel Holtz (30:40)

that while you’re doing this, you need to remember that it is not ⁓ a person and it is not conscious. I just want to say that in our intranet, when I sign onto our network in the morning, I have to click OK on a legal disclaimer. Every single time I turn my company laptop on, shouldn’t we have something like perhaps a disclaimer before you start interacting with these that this is a very lifelike, human-like experience that you’re about to have? Keep in mind, it’s not.

@nevillehobson (31:10)

No, absolutely. I think I do the same show. I’ve talked about this a lot over the last couple of years on this show elsewhere. I treat my chat GPT assistant like a person, but I do not. call it I have a name. Jane is what I call the chat GPT one. I don’t see it as a real person at all. Far from it. I’m astonished, frankly, that some people would think this is a person I’m talking to. And come on, for Christ’s sake, it’s an algorithm.

So yet it enables me to have a better interaction with that AI assistant if I can talk to it the way I do, which is like I’m talking to you now almost almost the same. But the bit that’s missing, and I think this is the heart of what Paul Tai was talking about, quoting from Antiqua et Nova, and I think this is the core part of the reflection of all this. must not lose sight of the wisdom of the heart.

which reminds us that each person is a unique being of infinite value and that the future must be shaped with and for people. And that has got to underpin everything that we do. And as I noted in my kind of rambling post I did write, it was actually better than the one I did the first draft, I must admit. It’s not a poetic flourish, it’s a framing. That’s the thing that we’re missing. We mustn’t see

AI is a neutral tool. It’s not really because we shape it and we need to encourage critical reflection on that human dignity. Wisdom can’t be reduced to data. The Vatican says that ethical judgment comes from human experience, not machine reasoning. Totally agree with that. So, I mean, this is to me the start of this conversation, really. And I think the kind of wisdom

or the thinking, certainly not wisdom, seems to me, the thinking that is the counter to that, such as what you outlined, is very powerful, is embedded almost everywhere you look. So I looked at this myself and think, OK, fine, I’m not going to evangelize this to anyone at all. I know what I’m going to do as far as I’m concerned. And that made me feel very comfortable that I’m going to follow the principles of this myself, which I have been doing for a while now, that is, in a sense, reflective in the world of algorithms and automation. What does it mean to remain human?

So I’ve changed how I use the AIs, I must have, and maybe chat GPT-5 happened at the time I started making that change. That is something I’ve started talking to people about. Did you think about this? How do you feel about that? And seeing what others think. And I’ve yet to encounter anyone who would say, this is amazing. What that’s saying, it makes total sense to me, let’s do this. No one’s saying that that I’ve talked to. So.

It’s something that I think interviews, the interview we did, others that Paul Tai is doing, and what I’m seeing increasingly other people starting to talk about, is the framing of it within this context. That’s where I think we need to go. We need to bring this into organizations. So ⁓ an invitation to reflect, let’s say, that, yes, this is great, what’s going on, and you’re doing this, you need to also pause and think about it from this perspective as well. That’s what I think.

Shel Holtz (34:34)

I would not disagree. And a lot of the development that’s happening in AI is focused on benefiting humanity. I’m looking at the scientific and medical research that it’s able to do. mean, just the alpha fold, which won the Nobel Prize for Demisys Abis is to benefit people. Where it’s probably benefiting people less is in business.

@nevillehobson (34:59)

Shel Holtz (35:06)

@nevillehobson (35:16)

benefiting people in that sense, because yes, it is. It’s about reintroducing, in a sense, conscience, care and context into thinking about what AI can do that is related to efficiency scale and all those business benefits. That’s not people oriented at all. No matter how they dress it up, saying, well, you employees are going to be more effective. No, it means that our share price will go up from a public listed company, we’ll get paid more money and all that kind of stuff. That’s what drives all of that, seems to

Shel Holtz (35:35)

@nevillehobson (35:45)

change it but reflect on it bring into this what does it mean to remain human in this world of algorithms and automation where things move so fast and the the ROI acronym is right there in the middle of

Shel Holtz (36:26)

Does we do we need ROI on everything?

@nevillehobson (36:35)

I tell you, he would.

Shel Holtz (36:39)

yeah, he was very skeptical of the need for ROI for everything. Hence, what’s the ROI of my pants? Of course, somebody came up with the ROI of pants. I remember that too. Insofar as determining what would happen if he went to work without wearing any versus the cost of pants for a year. ⁓ Yeah. All right, well, let’s away from.

@nevillehobson (36:50)

There’s some are away there, that’s a fact, yeah. Cool. Yep.

Shel Holtz (37:03)

And that practice is alive and well, and some firms, including companies that present themselves as PR or advocacy agencies, provide it openly. Crowds on demand, for example, has made no secret that it will recruit and script protesters calling the service advocacy campaigns or event management. I thought event management was like hiring the band and making sure the valet people showed up on time.

If all this sounds like a modern twist on an old tactic, it is for sure. From free whiskey and George Washington’s day to front groups created by big tobacco in the 90s, engineered public opinion has a long history. What’s new is the professionalization of the practice. Today, you can literally hire a firm to stage a rally, a counter protest, or a city council hearing appearance. It’s a service for sale and the bill goes to the client. Legally,

This all sits in a very gray zone. U.S. law requires disclosure for campaign advertising, for paid lobbying, but there’s no equivalent requirement for paid protesters. If you buy a TV ad, you have to disclose who paid for it. If you hire lobbyists, they have to disclose who they’re working for. But if you pay 200 people to show up at City Hall and protest, there’s no federal law that requires anyone to disclose that fact. That’s the protest loophole. Ethically, though,

There is no gray area whatsoever. PRSA’s code of ethics is clear. Honesty, disclosure, and transparency are non-negotiable. The code explicitly calls out deceptive practices like undisclosed sponsorships and front groups. IABC’s code says much the same. Accuracy, honesty, respect for audiences. Paying people to pretend to care about a cause or policy fails those tests.

The fact that it’s not illegal doesn’t make it acceptable. It just makes it a bigger risk for the profession because when the practice is exposed, as it inevitably is, the credibility of public relations is what takes the hit. And it does get exposed. In one case, retirees were recruited to hold signs at a protest they didn’t understand. In another, college students were promised easy money to show up and chant at a rally.

These are not grassroots activists. They’re actors in somebody else’s play. And when the story surfaces in the press, it’s not just the client who looks bad. It’s the agency and then by extension, the rest of the industry. So let’s be clear. Rent-a-mob tactics are not clever. They’re not innovative and they’re not public relations. They are deception. They turn authentic public expression into a commodity and they undermine democracy itself.

If our job is to build trust between organizations and their publics, this is the opposite of that. Here’s the call to action. PR professionals must refuse this work. Agencies should set policies that forbid it and train staff on how to respond if they’re asked. Use the PRSA code of ethics as your shield and point to IEBC standards as backup. And don’t just say no, educate your clients about why it’s wrong and how badly it can backfire.

because agencies can get pulled into this even without realizing it. A subcontractor or consultant may arrange the crowds, but the agency’s name is still on the campaign. That’s why vigilance is critical. Build those guardrails now. At the end of the day, this comes down to the disconnect between what the law allows and what ethics demands. Just because a tactic falls into a regulatory loophole doesn’t mean we should touch it. The opposite.

is true. It means communicators must hold themselves to the higher standard, because public trust is already fragile. If we let paid actors masquerade as genuine voices, we’ll find we have no real voices left at the end of the day.

@nevillehobson (41:20)

Shel Holtz (41:29)

@nevillehobson (41:49)

Shel Holtz (41:57)

Mary Beth West on the show, by the way. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (42:00)

So she criticizing very strongly PRSA in the US primarily, remaining silent on the issue. And she says they are therefore complicit in this quite strong accusation that but

Shel Holtz (42:13)

fiercest critic.

@nevillehobson (42:17)

So what is it about this that we can’t seem to… it’s like whack-a-mole, something else pops up all the time. So this astroturfing version 6, let’s call it, because there’s got to be at least five versions prior to this, how do we stop it?

Shel Holtz (43:02)

people in their audience know that this actually does happen, they at least suspect that it might be true. So it makes it really easy to dismiss the voice of one segment of society that has chosen to take to the streets or to come to the city council meeting or whatever in order to express themselves and be heard. And I think as…

some of these reports say that’s very, very dangerous for democracy. So there are a number of reasons that we need to call this out as inappropriate as a profession and to disassociate this practice from the practice of public relations.

@nevillehobson (44:12)

Shel Holtz (44:16)

@nevillehobson (44:23)

I agree. I agree.

So CTA for the professional bodies, I think, you need to pay attention to this. We’d love to hear from anyone on any of those bodies you mentioned, offer a comment on what do they think about all this and what should they be doing? Is it their call? How do we persuade members of those organizations to consider this and pay attention to this issue? Call to action then.

Shel Holtz (45:00)

to disagree with it, to pull my quote and say, look what this idiot said, you know? And to put it in the hands of the person who created the quote to determine whether somebody can do that on a social platform. I’m not sure I’m a big fan of that. I’m gonna need to give that one more thought and read more about Mastodon’s rationale. So I’ll be reading the links that you shared, Dan, but thank you, great report.

@nevillehobson (45:54)

Unlike existing laws that focus on specific harms, such as non-consensual pornography or fraud, Denmark’s approach is much broader. It treats the very act of copying a person’s features without permission as a violation of rights. Culture Minister Jakob Engels-Schmidt put it bluntly, human beings can be run through the digital copy machine, be misused for all sorts of purposes, and are not willing to accept that. The law, which has broad political support and is widely expected to pass,

would cover realistic digital imitations, including performances, and allow for compensation if someone’s likeness is misused. Importantly, it carves out protections for satire and parody. So it’s not about shutting down free expression, but about addressing digital forgery head on. Supporters see this as a proactive step, a way of getting ahead of technology that’s advancing far faster than existing rules. But here’s the catch.

Copyright law is a national law. Denmark can only enforce this within its own borders. Malicious actors creating deepfakes may be operating anywhere in the world, well outside the reach of Danish courts. Enforcement will depend heavily on cooperation from platforms like TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. And if they don’t comply, Denmark says it will seek severe fines or raise the matter at the EU level. That’s why some observers compare this to GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation.

a landmark idea that set the tone for digital rights, but struggled in practice with uneven performance and global scope. Denmark is small, but with its six months presidency of the European Union that it assumed on the 1st of July, it hopes to push the conversation across Europe. Still, the reality is that this measure will start as Danish law only, and its effectiveness will hinge on whether others adopt similar approaches. So we’re looking at a bold test case here. Can copyright law

with all its jurisdictional limits really become the tool that protects people from the misuse of their identities in the age of AI.

Shel Holtz (48:24)

qualify under every country’s law. And the first test, as I recall, was actually Adam Curry, had something that he, I think he’s something he created was used by an advertiser in a bus stop poster in the Netherlands. That could be. ⁓ And he took it to court and won on the Creative Commons license. So maybe

@nevillehobson (48:48)

I think it was a photo of his daughter or one of his children. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (49:09)

@nevillehobson (49:17)

The trouble with critic comments, is that you’ve got the license. That’s A, it’s voluntary, apart from anything else. B, it still requires the national legal structure in a particular country to adhere a case that’s presented to it. So that’s no different to as if it were the national law. And in Curry’s case, he didn’t get any money out of it. He got a victory, almost a Pyrrhic victory, but didn’t get any compensation.

But there are very few and far between the examples of success with Creative Commons. And I think part of the problem actually is that it’s still relatively rare. I’ll find anyone who knows what Creative Commons is. I mean, we’ve had little badges on our blogs and websites for 20 plus years. And, you know, I don’t see it on businesses, on media sites, nothing. I don’t see it at all anywhere other than people who are kind of involved in all this right at the start.

So it’s a challenge to do this. And I think the key is, would it get adopted by others? And I think it’s going to require a huge lift to make that happen. And maybe the example of Denmark might be good if they were able to show some successes in short order addressing this specific issue about deepfakes in particular.

So it’s a great initiative and I really hope it does go well. It’s not law yet, but it probably will become, from what I’ve been reading, the expectation is extremely high it will become law. And if they’re running, if they’re leading the EU in this next six months, the rest of the year, then they’ve got a good opportunity to make the case within the EU for others to do this. So it wouldn’t surprise me if one or two more countries might adopt this as a trial. Then which is you think of three doing it, let’s say they do.

Will it make any difference? Let’s see. Don’t write it off at all. GDPR has been held up as the kind of the exemplar regulation, ⁓ state regulation on data protection. And whether it’s had uneven enforcement and global scope, I agree. And the penalties against it, no one’s collecting money. It’s a huge deal to do that. But it’s still in place and it does have

an effect on other countries. The US in particular has all sorts of things about, you know, if you’re doing business in the EU, you need to pay attention to this and do all that kind of thing. You don’t have the freedom to do things as you did before. So it’s generally seen, I believe, as a good thing that it happened. But, you know, we’re at that stage where technology is enabling people to do not good things like deepfakes.

And so there is no real protection against that, it seems to me. I think the real trick will be is the compliance by social media platforms. If they are found culpable of hosting imaging or a video or whatever, not taking it down when they’re notified, they’ll get severe fines. I’m not sure what that means, but we need to see an example being made of someone. Haven’t seen that yet anywhere.

Shel Holtz (52:24)

@nevillehobson (52:24)

Here too.

Shel Holtz (52:48)

@nevillehobson (53:00)

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (53:15)

@nevillehobson (53:16)

you’ve got to be vigilant yourself. And I think in light of this and realities of this, you have to be vigilant. It’s easy to say what does that actually mean? How can you be really vigilant? Good example. I’m sure you’ve seen this show, the meeting on Monday last week between Trump and the leaders of the EU and Zelensky from Ukraine. It shows an image that was posted many places online.

US media in particular and social networks, X notably, showing like a photo, all the European leaders sitting in chairs in a kind of hallway outside Trump’s office waiting to see him, being called in to see him. And stories I read about this is how they were treated. Yet you don’t need to even look too closely at the image. Giveaways like the second person along has got three legs. And the linoleum pattern on the floor.

Shel Holtz (54:08)

@nevillehobson (54:09)

That’s a cultural thing that isn’t going to change anytime soon, unless changes happen to how we do all these things. So this is just another element in this hugely disruptive environment we’re all living in with technology, enabling us to do all these things that are nice until the bad guys start doing them. And that’s just human nature. Sorry, that’s how it is. So before you click and share this thing, this is now logic talking to reasonable people.

Just be sure that you’re sharing something real. I shared something recently that I forgot what it was now, but I deleted the post about 10 minutes after I sent it on Blue Sky. And I then wrote another post saying I had done that because I was taken in by something I saw and I should have known better because I normally don’t do this, but I just shared it. I don’t know why I did that even. I was having my morning coffee and I wasn’t paying attention too closely. So that’s the kind of thing that could trip people up.

This is what’s going on out there. So I think this thing that Denmark’s trying to do is brave and very bold and I hope they get success with it.

Shel Holtz (55:38)

@nevillehobson (55:41)

Shel Holtz (55:44)

a company to speak and believe it has a responsibility to do so, which let’s face it, this is why we were advocating for companies to take positions on certain issues under certain circumstances for ⁓ many years supported by research like the Edelman Trust Barometer. A separate Temple University study of the Blackout Tuesday movement showed that companies that stayed quiet faced real backlash on social media, but the consequences aren’t uniform.

Sometimes silence has little visible effect, at least in the short term. Take Home Depot. Just last week, immigration raids targeting day laborers took place outside stores in California. Reporters reached out to Home Depot for comment. Home Depot chose not to respond. So far, investors don’t seem to care, and the stock hasn’t suffered. But employees, activists, and customers who see this issue as central to the company’s identity

Well, they may feel differently. Silence can create space for others to define your values for you. This tension between internal and external audiences is critical. Employees are often the first to expect their employer to speak out, especially on issues that touch human rights, diversity, or workplace fairness. Silence can erode engagement and retention. Externally, it’s more complicated. Some customers or policymakers may punish a company for taking a stand,

Others may punish it for not taking one. And I’m thinking now of it was Coors Light with the one can that they made for the trans activist and that created polarization. People who said, we’re going to go out and buy Coors no matter how bad it is, just to offset the people on the right who are boycotting it.

In Europe, where stakeholder governance is stronger, there’s often a higher expectation that companies will weigh in. In the U.S., polarization makes every move fraught. Either way, communicators can’t afford to pretend that silence is neutral. It’s a choice, and it has consequences. So the question is, how do you decide? Well, here’s a simple decision framework. Start with expectations. Do you have stakeholders who believe your company should have a voice here?

Next, consider the business nexus. Does the issue intersect directly with your operations, employees, or customers? Timing is important. Is there an urgent moment where absence will be noticed, or is this more of a slow burn? Authenticity matters. Do you have a track record that supports what you’d say, or would a statement ring hollow? Then look at consistency. Have you spoken on similar issues before? If you break the pattern, can you explain why? people notice?

And finally, consider risk tolerance. How much reputational risk can the organization realistically absorb? Sometimes after applying this framework, silence might still make sense, but there’s a way to be silent well. It starts with transparency inside the organization. Explain to employees why the company isn’t taking a public stance. Reinforce the company’s values in operational ways through hiring practices, supplier standards, community investments.

brief key stakeholders privately so they’re not blindsided, and set monitoring targets so you can pivot if the situation escalates. For communicators, here’s a quick checklist to keep handy. Map stakeholder expectations, test the business nexus, pressure test your authenticity and consistency, advise on operational actions that back up values, and plan both the statement and the silence. Corporate silence

doesn’t have to mean cowardice and speaking out isn’t always virtuous, but both are strategic choices and both can have lasting impact on trust. Communicators are the ones who can help leaders cut through the noise, weigh the risks and make sure that whichever choice they make, voice or silence, it’s intentional, transparent and aligned with the values the company claims to hold.

@nevillehobson (1:00:22)

Shel Holtz (1:00:46)

@nevillehobson (1:00:48)

Shel Holtz (1:00:48)

@nevillehobson (1:01:11)

Shel Holtz (1:01:39)

used TaskRabbit.

@nevillehobson (1:01:41)

I know that doesn’t work here at all. TaskRabbit. It exists, but I think in one city only. And there are other equivalents to TaskRabbit, but some of these local websites are really good. But I used someone not long ago where I hired someone to do something and I had them go to the DIY store to pick up the stuff and buy the stuff and all that kind of bit. So I kind of get that. So the NPR piece says day labor sites have sprung up.

as Home Depot grew and it became one of their big customer base, if you like, as a direct result. But this struck me, this piece kind of leapt out at me that talking about this on Reddit, according to NPR, Home Depot workers have begun trading tales of raid impacts. Some claim fewer contractors are visiting and stores are struggling to meet sales goals. Others say it’s business as usual and sales are booming. So it’s a mixed bag.

But that’s going on. That to me will be a huge alarm bell for the company if they kind of button their lip and zip their lip in public and private or internally, and your employees are doing this. So that signifies quite a few things. They quote one example, again, another alarm bell in Los Angeles this time after a raid that happened from the immigration police. This person

talked about the car park. The car parking lot was always full, she said. Right now, though, there’s so many spaces, there’s hardly anyone here. And this woman runs a housekeeping business and usually sends her employees to stock up on cleaning supplies or liquids for a pressure washer. But today, for the first time in a while, she herself was out the Home Depot. Why? Because they’re afraid to come, she said, they’re afraid to be here. That’s not not good at all, that kind of environment. So

If I were Home Depot, I mean, I wonder, tell me what you think, Charmin. They should be paying attention to that, I would have thought.

Shel Holtz (1:03:38)

their employees care about it. So it gets back to that little framework for deciding whether you’re going to say something about it. Is there an expectation and does it intersect with your business? And in this case, the answer to both those questions is pretty clearly yes. Now, what they would say, I don’t know. Home Depot’s founder was famously very, very right wing on the political spectrum.

@nevillehobson (1:04:11)

Shel Holtz (1:04:31)

@nevillehobson (1:04:50)

Shel Holtz (1:04:54)

@nevillehobson (1:05:04)

Shel Holtz (1:05:22)

@nevillehobson (1:05:43)

with that going on. But this just illustrates to me the huge complication on say something or not. If you do, what do you say? If you don’t, what don’t you say? I mean, in a sense, you can’t not say anything, although I guess that’s what they’re doing. That doesn’t seem very healthy for relationships internally, because this kind of thing, from what I observe across the Atlantic here in the UK,

seems to be getting worse in America with these immigration raids, the uncertainty, the cruelty, the awfulness of it all that doesn’t look like it’s going to diminish any time soon. And if anything, it’s going to get even worse than what I’ve been reading.

Shel Holtz (1:06:26)

Says he’s the neighbor that everybody counts on to come over and help them fix things. He’s a great father and husband. He’s a great member of the community. He has a side hustle business. He is what you want in a member of your community. And yet he was grabbed up by ice. So yeah, there’s a reason that, you know, downtown LA is dead. People are afraid to be out. That’s affecting the people who ⁓ sell them stuff when they come out to do shopping and, and.

live their lives. So this is going to have long-term fallout for sure. And I think that the organizations that are at the heart of this, the fact that they’re saying nothing, I think leads people to see them maybe as cowardly or maybe as complicit. You have to think about the consequences of silence. And that’s what this article that I drew this report from.

makes clear that article from the Wharton School. I quote more from the Wharton School these days. It’s really become a source that it wasn’t when we started this show. But in any case, use a framework. Don’t say, should we say something about this or not? Use a framework to reach a good logical decision.

@nevillehobson (1:07:49)

Thank

I think it’s, yeah.

Yeah, and I’m thinking as well, OK, what’s going to happen? Let’s just use Home Depot as an example here. When, not if, when, someone either in the media or in the old media, let’s say, or someone in the new media landscape publicly asks a question of them. What are they going to do about X? You know, what about that guy who was beaten up in the parking lot of your store in LA? What are you going to do about that?

What are they going to say? So I’m wondering, and this is kind of straying into an area of like pre-crisis communication planning perhaps, but have they got a what if scenario plan? I wonder.

Shel Holtz (1:08:46)

@nevillehobson (1:09:03)

Yeah, but my point…

Shel Holtz (1:09:13)

@nevillehobson (1:09:19)

that none of that is happening. So when it does happen, are they ready? None of that’s happening. mean, you say they’re pursuing them, but no one’s talking about that at all. I don’t see any reporting about that. What I would see reporting about is someone with a lot of influence online, as perceived by whoever, frankly, asks a question and that gets amplified widely and gets picked up everywhere that they

This happened in the parking lot at Home Depot. And this is what this person said. And they embed the video, you know, when he recorded what he did. And they’re silent.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Shel Holtz (1:10:00)

Yeah, I mean, there are all kinds of videos from people in parking lots and people where these raids are happening. And I’ve heard no comment from the institutions involved. Home Depot being at the top of the list.

@nevillehobson (1:10:22)

Shel Holtz (1:10:28)

Mr. Beast, that’s who needs to do it.

It is.

@nevillehobson (1:10:46)

interesting. So the poster kicked it off came from someone who had just received an email from PA Images, one of the photo agencies here in the UK, demanding £700 for using one of their photos. The image had appeared in a blog post more than two years ago and the author noted that the photographer had been credited. They thought this counted as fair use and were shocked to discover it didn’t. They’d since removed the image and asked the group whether this was simply an expensive lesson.

or if there was room to negotiate. Well, that prompted a flurry of comments. One person pointed out that the cost of the fine could have paid for multiple original photos, properly licensed for unlimited use. It reminded that investing in photography upfront can save headaches later. Another comment stressed that fair use is an American legal concept. In the UK, what we have is fair dealing. And crucially, it doesn’t apply to photographs in this way. Using a photo without explicit permission or a license is infringement.

At best you might negotiate the charge down to what the license fee would have been. Others shared their own experiences. One person described how AFP, that’s a French news agency, fined their organization £270 for an old image that had been carried over from a previous website. They’d apologized, paid up, and then run copyright training for their team to avoid repeat mistakes. Another said they’d removed an image straight away, but the agency still produced a screenshot of the original post

and pursued them for payment anyway. The practical advice that emerged was fairly consistent. If you don’t have written permission or license, you are liable. Remove the image immediately, apologize, and then try to negotiate. Some suggested starting with a quarter of the asking fee. Keep detailed records of where every image comes from and the terms of its license. There was also a broader ethical undercurrent. Some respondents had little sympathy.

saying that too many people still think photos are fair game online when they aren’t. One even noted that their partner, photographer, often earns more from infringement settlements than from people licensing his images in the first place. So the original poster clarified that their agency normally does hire photographers and pays them fairly. This was an old blog post that predated the agency and they genuinely wanted advice rather than sympathy. Still, they accepted that it was a mistake that would cost them money.

So the takeaway here is clear. Crediting a photographer is not the same as having permission. Unless you have a license or explicit written agreement, you’re exposed to claims. And with agencies increasingly using bots and reverse image search to enforce copyright, the risk of being caught is only growing. For communicators, it’s a sharp reminder that visuals are not free to use simply because they’re online, and that professional practice means treating images with the same respect as written.

Shel Holtz (1:14:03)

@nevillehobson (1:14:08)

Shel Holtz (1:14:14)

I’m guilty. used to, when I was an independent consultant, which I haven’t been for nearly eight years now, good God, time really does fly. I used to do a email newsletter. It was a wrap of the week’s news in communication and technology. You know, as we continue to do for this show and for blog posts.

@nevillehobson (1:14:39)

to subscribe to your newsletter. I remember it. I remember it.

Shel Holtz (1:14:42)

Wrap, I always had an image of something that was wrapped in one way or another just to play off of that whole wrap concept. And I was always out there searching images for something that was wrapped. was trees that were wrapped and buildings that were wrapped and vehicles that were wrapped. And I just grabbed them and put them at the top of my newsletter without giving any thought to where that came from. If I were doing that today, I would definitely have AI

produce an image of something wrapped, because I certainly didn’t have a budget to pay for photography. The only reason I was able to do that was because they were online, but it was not right. Even though most of those images were, I seem to recall using the Creative Commons library of images, which is still available. But… ⁓

@nevillehobson (1:15:31)

was similar, Shel, to you. I was doing exactly the same thing, but I always used to credit the source, thinking that was fine. I didn’t feel guilty. And even if a website that I saw a great picture had copyright, blah, blah, all rights reserved, I’d say, well, give them a credit and a link to their website. I’d be OK. I fell foul of that once only back in early days, about 2007, Reuters.

Shel Holtz (1:15:39)

@nevillehobson (1:15:57)

you are liable. There’s no ifs or buts, there’s no gray areas, black or white. So I tend not to use a lot of AI generated images. I subscribe to Adobe Stock, which is a good library. I use Unsplash. I pay for the premium version that gives you pictures that aren’t to take. I tend to go big on metaphor type pictures, and there’s loads of stuff for that. But I’m always also looking for someone who says,

you know, create a commons for instance, and that’s great. Flickr still a good source. So that, but if you’re like in a large enterprise and you’ve got, you know, multiple stuff, things going on, that’s not really a practical approach. And you’ve probably got a license with Shutterstock or one of the big image licensing firms. So that’s right. But this is, I think for small to medium sized businesses, individual consultants and so forth, this is an easy trap to fall into. And again, it’s just remembering that

key advice point if you don’t have permission or a license you’re liable. So don’t do it.

Shel Holtz (1:17:19)

a subscription to Dreamstime, a stock photo service, and how people will say, I can tell if something was produced by AI. I can tell if something came from a stock photo service. Those stock photos do tend to have that stock photo stamp on them, you know, that look. come on, the computer key that has the word that is…

@nevillehobson (1:17:32)

But I find depends on the image.

You wouldn’t use stuff like that. I certainly don’t. I you see them, the kind of happy smiling group in a business meeting. People are not like that at the workplace. Yeah, yeah. So don’t use those. No, don’t use those.

Shel Holtz (1:17:48)

I use AI to create images. I mean, we’ve changed our internet platform, but the one we changed from required an image for every article, a hero image. And if it was about a project, that was easy. We had photos from projects. But if it was about a more abstract concept,

You know, either it was a stock photo service or we were stuck. But now I can come up with an image that just perfectly conveys the idea that we’re trying to get across. I remember I did one about what goes into developing a proposal, an article on what goes into developing a proposal for a commercial construction project. We’re talking about, you know, two, three, four hundred million dollars of project cost.

And these are big deals and the proposals take weeks, months to put together. And I think there’s a lack of appreciation for what the business development team goes through when they’re putting these together. And for the hero image, I had a group of people who are clearly office workers, not out in the field building. And they’ve got their laptops and their tablets and their phones out. But in the middle of the table, rising out of the table is the building that they’re pitching. It was an ideal image.

Another one that I use this for is our April Fool’s article, which was always about something completely ridiculous. I did an April Fool’s article one year about new sustainable building material of chewed bubble gum that has been scraped off of underneath desks and underneath railings. Not only is it sustainable, but it’s minty fresh, that type of thing.

@nevillehobson (1:19:21)

Shel Holtz (1:19:30)

@nevillehobson (1:19:36)

Yeah. thing. Yep.

In which case,

so the takeaway from all of this, yeah, so the takeaway from all this is if you don’t have written permission or a license, you are liable. So get permission or a license or use a generative AI approach. Pretty clear.

Shel Holtz (1:19:54)

Works for me. And that will bring us to the end of this episode of For Immediate Release, episode 478, the long form episode for August 2025. Our next long form episode will drop on Monday, September 29th. We’ll be recording that on Saturday, the 27th. And until then, Neville, have a great couple of weeks until we get together for our next short midweek episode.

@nevillehobson (1:20:37)

The post FIR #478: When Silence Isn’t Golden appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

User-generated content is at a turning point. With generative AI models cranking out tons of slop, content repositories are being polluted with low-quality, often useless material. No website is more vulnerable than Wikipedia, the open-source reference site populated entirely with articles created (and revised) by users. How Wikipedia is handling the issue — in light of its strict governance policies — is worth watching, especially for organizations that also rely on user-generated content.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:00)

@nevillehobson (00:08)

to churn out articles that look convincing on the surface, but are riddled with fabricated citations, clumsy phrasing, or even remnants of chat bot prompts like as a large language model. Until now, the process of removing bad articles from Wikipedia has relied on long discussions within the volunteer editor community to build consensus, sometimes lasting weeks or more. That pace is no match for the volume of junk AI can generate.

So Wikipedia has now introduced a new defense, a speedy deletion policy that lets administrators immediately remove articles if they clearly bear the hallmarks of AI generation and contain bogus references. It’s a pragmatic fix, they say, not perfect, but enough to stem the tide and signal that unreviewed AI content has no place in an encyclopedia built on human verification and trust. This development is more than just an internal housekeeping matter.

It highlights the broader challenge of how open platforms can adapt to the scale and speed of generative AI without losing their integrity. And it comes at a moment when Wikipedia is under pressure from another front, regulation. Just this month, it lost a legal challenge to the UK’s online Safety Act, a ruling that raises concerns about whether its volunteer editors could be exposed to identity checks or new liabilities. The court left some doors open for future challenges, but the signal is clear.

the rights and responsibilities of platforms like Wikipedia are being redrawn in real time. Put together these two stories, the fight against AI slop and the battle with regulators shows us that even the most resilient online communities are entering a period of profound change. And that makes Wikipedia a fascinating case study for what lies ahead for all digital knowledge platforms. For communicators, these developments at Wikipedia matter deeply. They touch on questions of credibility.

how we can trust the information we rely on and share, and on the growing role of regulation in shaping how online platforms operate. And there are other implications too, from reputation risks when organizations are misrepresented, to the lessons in governance that communicators can draw from how Wikipedia responds. So, Shail, there’s a lot here for communicators to grapple with. What do you see as the most pressing for communicators right now?

Shel Holtz (02:52)

We have talked about in past episodes, the fact that more obscure articles can have inaccuracies that will sit for a long time because nobody reads it, especially it’s not read by people who would have the right information and correct it. But by and large, it is a self-correcting mechanism based on community, which is great. It does seem that the shoe is on the other foot here because when Wikipedia first launched,

I’m sure you’ll recall that schools and businesses banned it. You can’t use this, you can’t trust it. It’s written by regular people and not professional encyclopedia authors. Therefore, you’re going to be marked down if you use Wikipedia, it’s banned. And they fought that fight for a long time and finally became a recognized authoritative site. And here they are now banning something new.

that we’re still trying to grapple with. We do need to grapple with it. The AI slop issue is certainly an issue. I worry that they’re going to pick up false positives here. Some of the hallmarks of AI writing are also hallmarks of writing. I mean, if I hear one more person say, an dash is absolutely a sign that it was written by AI. I’m gonna throw my computer out the window.

I’ve been using dashes my entire career. I was using dashes back when I was doing part-time typesetting to make extra money when I was in college. And dashes are routine. There is nothing about them that makes them a hallmark of AI. That is ridiculous. But we are going to see some legit articles tossed out with the slop. The other thing is some of the slop may have promise. It may be

the kernel of a good article, and this is a community platform, and wouldn’t people be able to go in and say, wow, this is really badly written, I yeah, yeah, I may have done this, but there’s not an article on this topic yet, so I have expertise, I’m gonna go in and start to clean this up. It’s a conundrum, what are you gonna do at this point? We haven’t had the time to develop the kinds of solutions to this issue that might take root.

And yet the volume of AI slop is huge. The number of people producing it is equally large. And you have to do something. So I think it’s trial and error at this point to see what works. And there will be some negative fallout from some of these actions. But you got to try stuff to take it to the next level and try the next thing.

@nevillehobson (05:52)

I think there’s a what I see is a is a really big issue generally that this highlights and part of it is based on my own experience of editing Wikipedia articles in a couple of cases for an organization working with people like butler inc. Bill Butler has been an interview guest on this podcast a few times, which is

The speed of things, the one memorable thing that stays in my mind about using Wikipedia or trying to progress change or addition is the humongous length of time it takes with the volunteer editor community. The defense typically is, well, they’re volunteers, they’re not full-time, they’re not employees, they’re not dedicated, they say you’ve got to be patient, they’re doing it for their own free will to help things. I get all that, I’m a volunteer myself in many other areas, but…

That’s great. But as they themselves are saying, things are moving at light speed with AI slop generation, you can’t afford to have three to four weeks where you you the the person editing is asked the community, is this good? Are you okay with this? What else? And three weeks go by before you get a reply. And often you don’t you have to nudge and so forth that to get that ain’t going to work today. So it needs something better. They have this

really interesting looking projects called Project AI Cleanup, which is got, it’s well defined in the Wikipedia, on Wikipedia what it is. They’ve also are developing a non AI powered tool called Edit Check. That’s geared towards helping new contributors fall in line with the policies. So part of the problem a lot of the time, I think is the elaborate policies and procedures you’ve got to follow.

It’s not user friendly for people who don’t know all this. And they do have a history of people not welcoming newbies to it readily. So all that’s in the background. But this is quite interesting, EditCheck, towards helping new contributors fall in line with the policies and writing guidelines. They’re also working on adding a paste check to the tool, which will ask users who’ve pasted a large chunk of text into an article whether they’ve actually written it. So it’s kind of helping that kind of focus.

I think I get what you say and I don’t disagree by the way on the discovery of things and you know there might be something good here and all this I get all that and I hope that continues but this is urgent this really does require attention and I think the one of the points in the why this matters to communicate this section is

the big one, think reputation risk. I mean, some of the research I did, this is going back a couple of years now when I was working on a particular project, was the reality that when you, let’s say as a communicator, I think about something related to your employer, your client or some work you’re doing about an organization, the first place you will go to typically is Wikipedia or the first place that shows up in the search results in that old traditional day that we’ve now passed that now, but as it was back then.

You get your, you know, above the fold screen full of results on Google. And the three things that make you feel this is this I will go to would be ideally the the organization’s website first and foremost. And it might have someone else talking about the organization’s maybe a second, the third result is going to be the Wikipedia entry. And then you have a little box on the right hand side, which summarizes everything and that’s taken from the Wikipedia entry.

So if you have not updated your Wikipedia entry or it is inaccurate, that’s what’s going to show up there. So getting this right is good. But unfortunately, that won’t work in the day of AI slot because things change so fast. And just wait till agenting AI gets on the case and you got all these bots creating content as well. I think the point about dashes and so forth, that isn’t going to stop anytime soon, I don’t think. And I believe that.

that presents a big challenge to Wikipedia where you have human verifiers checking things, where this artist has got 15 dashes. Hey, come on, that’s got to be AI generates. So all that kind of thing, they still have to figure out how to do that. I think your point about they got to do something for this. Absolutely. And this is probably the one thing they’re doing, but there’s more they still need to do that.

is likely to be quite a challenge, speed with, because of the speed how this is evolving so fast. So I think it comes down to, suppose, you the information consumer, the user of the stuff you’re finding, you absolutely need to do your own due diligence more than ever you have done before. Don’t just believe Wikipedia because, hey, it’s Wikipedia, it’s a community generated site. I hear all the stories I’m sure you have about that’s the reason why it’s no good.

because it’s community generated. I don’t buy that argument. I’ve rarely had any issues. And one thing I do use a lot myself as part of the verification is the talk pages and the history of editing pages. And you get a feel for, you know, what’s been happening here and so forth. Plus, there are services. Butler has one. There’s another one that’s the name escape me, but it was it’s owned by that that guy we interviewed in Israel who was behind that.

that will, Wiki Alerts, that will notify you whenever a page you’re paying attention to has got changes, tells you what the changes are. So, and Wikipedia itself has some pretty good analytics now and alerts and so forth and so on. So, communicators can help with this as well in reviewing stuff they know about pages and content they know about to make sure that it doesn’t require, it doesn’t have any issues that they should be concerned about. But that’s the regular climate.

You have AI literacy. communicate this need to know literally or need to know how to get help in recognizing AI generated text. There isn’t a single guide. There’s lots of people with opinions out there. Your own common sense will often help you. Pitfalls like fabricated citations, how do you really check those? Responsible use in professional context. This brings that to the forefront again, like it was originally and you mentioned.

organizations, schools, academia banning the use of all this back in the 2000s. Now we’re in the 2020s and this is becoming more urgent it seems to

Shel Holtz (12:05)

@nevillehobson (12:21)

Shel Holtz (12:32)

The other issue that I think is going to be interesting is that the quality of the output is going to only improve. And where you can tell bad writing from a bad prompt right now. Well, first of all, you’re going to have more people learn how to prompt well, which will make it harder to identify that it was done by AI, especially if somebody takes five minutes to go through it and edit it and make a few revisions. the AI is just going to crank out better stuff.

@nevillehobson (13:09)

Shel Holtz (13:25)

@nevillehobson (13:46)

Shel Holtz (13:54)

@nevillehobson (14:14)

The famous example I’ve heard so many times is probably in the very early 2000s, a British author asked Wikipedia to correct his entry because his date of birth was wrong. And they said, sorry, you’re not a neutral point of view. We can’t do that. And they refused to make the change. I mean, the absurdity of that struck a lot of people as utterly absurd. But if you actually read the policies on this, it’s not absurd at all.

Shel Holtz (15:03)

@nevillehobson (15:03)

is find a neutral point of view to him or her, tell Wikipedia and provide the source proving it, which could be, here’s a copy of the birth certificate from Somerset House or whatever it was at the time they do. it’s clear that, and again, in the context of communicators, when the first round of guides for PR people from the CIPR back in 2012.

that the need for this was apparent very, very quickly to educate PR folks particularly who did not grasp that concept of neutrality and neutral point of view. So they’d have to change a lot if ⁓ agentic AI got into the mix there. I think the more pressing realization perhaps is not agentic AI as an ally of you, not at all. It’s a tool for the bad guys to create really questionable content. You’ve never spot that.

And that’s you need another AI to pay attention. So all these things are probably in the mix there somewhere. The tool they’ve got or the project they’ve got the AI cleanup project, as they’re calling it, is advice, editing advice for community members. It’s a little light on the detail, but I haven’t drilled into all the stuff on the menu that you can go to on how to do this is actually very well thought through this.

⁓ where it goes into detail that you wouldn’t think of, know, broken links, how to fix those to make them to not be broken, finding something that does work properly on fixing common mistakes of free images in the Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, there’s copyright issues surrounding that. So all that’s in there too. But what strikes me at the end of it, Shell, is that there are smart people thinking about all of this and it’s great. But I’m not sure that

⁓ humans doing this alone are going to be able to grasp the speed with which this is is upon us. And that’s where I think also AI Genre, whether it’s agentic or not, I don’t know, could be a huge aid in the kind of here’s something that needs reviewing and checking fast, boom, put your AI on it’s not not a human. Although you’ve got to have the human as the kind of

ultimate arbiter or something that’s to be removed or not. So it’s a challenge for the very methodology of Wikipedia, it seems to me, and this reliance on community generated content because the bad guys, and I don’t mean this only in that there are people deliberately doing this, but the bad guys embracing bad agentic AI are moving faster than you can think of. And that’s the bigger threat to Wikipedia, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz (17:39)

@nevillehobson (17:55)

Shel Holtz (18:07)

@nevillehobson (18:11)

The post FIR #477: Deslopifying Wikipedia appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Swarms of consultants descend on companies that have engaged their firms, racking up billable hours and cranking out PowerPoint presentations that summarize the data they’ve analyzed. That business model is at risk, given the amount of that work that AI can now handle. Recognizing the threat, some consulting firms are actively reengineering their businesses, with McKinsey out in front. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville review the actions of several firms and agencies, and discuss what might come next for consultants.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)

Shel Holtz (00:08)

AI is the catalyst for that transformation and the realization that it can do a lot of what McKinsey’s highly paid human consultants do faster, cheaper, and sometimes just as well. For nearly a century, McKinsey has built into business on armies of bright young consultants, fresh from top universities, synthesizing vast amounts of complex information and advising C-suites on what they ought to do next. But now,

instead of a small battalion of analysts, a project might require just two or three people, along with an assortment of AI agents, tools that write in the classic McKinsey tone, check the logic of arguments, summarize interviews, and crank out PowerPoint decks. McKinsey has rolled out, are you sitting down, 12,000 of these AI agents, and its CEO predicts a not too distant future with one AI agent for every human employee.

And they’re not alone. Boston Consulting Group has Dexter for presentation building in Gene, a conversational assistant. Deloitte has Sidekick and Zora AI. PwC, KPMG, EY, they all have their own fleets of AI helpers. At McKinsey, over 70 % of employees are already using a tool called Lili, which taps into a century’s worth of the firm’s knowledge.

EY is using AI with 80,000 of its tax professionals, and rather than seeing that as a job killer, its CEO says it could actually help them double the firm’s size. And that’s an important point. While AI is eliminating some roles, particularly entry-level repetitive work, it’s also changing the skill mix. For consultants, that means fewer suits with PowerPoints and more partners in the trenches.

co-creating solutions with clients and helping organizations implement change. As one Oliver Wyman executive put it, the age of arrogance of the management consultant is over. Clients don’t want abstract strategy anymore, they want execution, training and transformation. Now for those of us in organizational communication, there’s a clear parallel. AI is already reshaping our own work in much the same way, handling…

media monitoring, sentiment analysis, and first draft content creation. In public relations, agencies like Edelman and Golan are using AI to track reputation, analyze audience sentiment, and even test campaign ideas on synthetic focus groups. The USC Annenberg study on AI and communications found many agency leaders are building cultures of experimentation around AI, seeing it as a way to free their teams for higher value work. But, and this is a big but,

The risks are real. In both consulting and PR, the differentiator going forward won’t be who can use AI. It will be who can layer human judgment, creativity, and trust on top of AI speed and scale. As one McKinsey partner put it, the basic layer of mediocre expertise goes away. The distinctive expertise becomes even more valuable. And that’s a key takeaway for communicators. First, the business model has to adapt.

Just as consulting firms are moving from billable hours to outcome-based fees, agencies are rethinking traditional retainers in favor of value-based pricing, charging for results, not hours. We’ve talked about this on FIR before. Second, the human skills that AI can’t replicate, relationship building, empathy, strategic thinking, become even more critical. And third, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that treat AI as a collaborator, not a threat.

@nevillehobson (04:14)

Shel Holtz (04:16)

US employers cited AI as the reason for over 10,000 job cuts in July alone, and layoffs surged 140 % year over year in that month. In total, more than 800,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year. Now, many of these AI-related layoffs are under-reported or hidden, buried under euphemisms like technological updates or restructuring.

The outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas notes that only 75 layoffs in the first half of the year were explicitly attributed to AI, but they warn the real number is almost certainly higher, much higher. This isn’t theoretical. Across sectors from consulting to communication, the integration of AI doesn’t just augment roles, it reshapes them and in some cases eliminates them entirely.

In any case, the future of consulting and of communication belongs to those who can bring something to the table that no chatbot ever will.

@nevillehobson (05:40)

A trigger in my mind ⁓ reminded me of a post I wrote in my own blog in February about the need to change the bill about hours model. As you said, we talked about it in FIR. We actually came up in our interview with Steve Rubell earlier this year as well. And I’ve been trying to do this. This is the catalyst where you can’t ignore this. No one’s going to want to pay a consultant on an hourly retainer basis.

when AI in its various shapes and forms, particularly agentic AI, it’s going to be totally apparent to anyone that that’s doing the grunt work. Your value is kind of like, this is what it means, Mr. Client, or actually more than that, much more than that, in fact, although AI will help you do that. So it will require a rethinking of the whole relationship model between consultants and clients. And I doubt

truly doubt more than 5 % of consultants, which basically are the big ones you’ve mentioned, are ready for that. I don’t think they are. So it doesn’t mean to say that no one’s going to change. It’s going to be a painful process. The ones who I think will benefit from this will be the ones who are already making plans for a shift. And it could be that ⁓

number of organizations already having conversations with clients who are quite happy, quite comfortable with how things currently are and don’t really like the idea of change. That is all to do with human resistance to change more than anything I would say. You could give them the logic about here’s the cost benefits, why we should change, but it’s the emotional bit you need to bring into this, which I think is an opportunity for consultants to

kind of, as you mentioned in your narrative, to position you, the consultant, as the critical addition to the mix that blends the value of the agentic AI and other aspects of artificial intelligence with your irreplaceable skill in literally bringing that to the table to illustrate to the client.

what it means for what they’re trying to achieve and the role that these tools will have. This is not new at all in the sense of suddenly we’re talking about it. We’ve been talking about this in different ways for quite a while. I think though what I’ve seen most of the conversations tend to be at a really high level and very technically focused. So this needs conversations on a far more emotional level that so that people can grasp quite clearly what the benefits are.

PRSA had a report just a month ago in June about how AI is driving PR innovation. It’s not about the main topic here, but it’s absolutely connected to it, because that’s exactly how you’re going to be able to use a word I dislike intensely, but it’s apt to harness the power of this that enables you to do the things that the PRSA mentions in their report, hyper-personalized media pictures they talk about, predictive crisis simulation.

real-time event adaptation, visual storytelling, and cross-cultural adaptation, that one’s most interesting. So you’re seeing these are the kind of outcomes that you would get when you harness all this intelligence, combining yours with the, ⁓ well, the algorithmic intelligence of artificial intelligence. So it’s an exciting time, although I fear that many people

Will not do well out of this change that’s coming

Shel Holtz (10:06)

@nevillehobson (10:28)

Shel Holtz (10:34)

@nevillehobson (10:49)

Shel Holtz (11:01)

After you move beyond that, say, okay, we’ve adapted this technology so that it makes our lives easier with all of these tasks that we had to perform in a more manual way before. What else can we do with this? That’s where it gets interesting is where you start to see what these things can do that you hadn’t imagined and that you weren’t already doing that benefit your life and your organization. And when you look at this idea of reshaping

the business. I don’t think most businesses of any kind, consulting or anything else, are there yet. They’re still at the, how can we do what we’re already doing better, faster, cheaper than we were doing before with, by using AI and not how can we rethink the way this business operates.

And McKinsey, think, is already heading there. They’re already saying, look, rather than sending a pod of 30 consultants out to the client and taking over 10 offices on site and having this presence and cranking out PowerPoints and crunching all of this data, we’re just gonna have some people in the trenches there working with them. The AI will come up with

@nevillehobson (12:24)

Shel Holtz (12:50)

@nevillehobson (13:01)

Shel Holtz (13:17)

fulfill their fundamental mission, which is getting news and information into the hands of the people in the communities that they serve. So it’s good to see McKinsey doing this. It’s worrisome that we ⁓ don’t yet see other organizations, many other organizations, that they’re still in that phase of how can this replace the tactical work that we do or augment the tactical work that we do, not how does it reshape how we get our work

what our business is all about and how we do it.

@nevillehobson (14:19)

the small to medium enterprise, the small consulting firm, mid-size consulting firms, for that matter, ⁓ who aren’t going to be about changing the whole business model. They’re going to be about what can they deliver to the client that makes absolute sense to where that client’s at on this journey that we’re all on. So it could well be that you’re going to see, you won’t see uniformity in this at all. What we’ll see, which is most welcome,

is the McKinsey’s and the Ernst & Young’s taking the strongest lead to reinvent the businesses of consulting, if you like. And that’ll filter out, gradually. It’ll be very uneven. And some won’t do it, in which case they may not survive or they may not evolve. Who knows what’s going to happen in that sense. But that’s good, in my opinion, because the kind of

Let’s look at how AI will help us reshape entirely our business model. It’s for everyone right now. If you’ve got a 10 person consulting practice, that’s not for you, I would think, or you could argue, well, actually, it might be, it should be easier because you’re smaller and more nimble. We don’t know really what this is going to look like. But what I see, though, is a two-way pressure stream where clients are going to be pressuring their agencies, their consulting partners, if you will.

I’m hearing about this, let’s talk about this. We want to do X. You then got an opportunity to say, let’s talk about that because I’ve got three ideas that could work that are absolutely on this avenue. But it’s not going to happen quickly and it isn’t going to be for most businesses, I would argue, not yet. ⁓ For the big ones where there’s a lot at stake and they need to do things like, hey, we’re not going to send 100 consultants out this client at

X hundred dollars per hour or whatever it might be, we’re going to work out a deal where the outcomes are really what we’re going to be judged upon. And yes, we’ll have a hundred agentic consultants and there’ll be three human beings who lead them. Or as we have discussed on F.I.R. Shell, one of the leaders may well be another AI. So but that’s not for everyone. These are this kind of big picture ideas that scares the hell out of a lot of people, I have to say. So this is uneven.

It’s exciting or a nightmare depending on your point of view. I think it’s exciting personally. I could see for instance, independent consultants are the ones who are probably most at risk, where you’ve got a nice gig going with a handful of clients, you all like each other, they know you. But as an individual, you just absolutely cannot deliver what they need without partnering with someone else.

be a big shake up, I would say in this, but it’s going to take a while and by a while, I don’t mean 10 years, you’re looking at two to three years before you see an impact in this I would venture. So interesting times ahead, as someone said recently.

Shel Holtz (17:45)

it’s definitely the fastest growing technology we’ve ever seen, which is a conundrum because we tend to adapt at the same pace that we always have, regardless of the fact that this technology is growing by leaps and bounds. And for those…

smaller consulting firms that maybe now is not the time, I would worry about that because if I get an assignment and I go into a client and I’m presenting them with a monthly invoice showing hours burned on this client’s work and I’ve got 15 people taking four months to do this assignment and I’m hearing through my network about colleagues that are working with other consulting firms that are getting it done.

in three weeks with a team of two consultants and getting great outcomes and spending less, then I am going to worry about my client wanting to work with them because they’re more efficient at it.

@nevillehobson (18:48)

I agree, but that’s not really what I’m talking about because not everyone is going to be impacted by this yet, not at all. And in fact, I don’t believe it’s feasible to say everyone suddenly has got to change right now. Get rid of the billable hours model. ⁓ indeed, indeed, many are not. You’re right. They ought to start thinking about it. You’re not going to see the kind of horrific outcome suddenly that this nice little consulting firm

Shel Holtz (19:04)

@nevillehobson (19:18)

So I think you’re right, and I don’t disagree at all that everyone needs to be cognizant of what’s coming down the track in one way or another. And so people who are talking about it, people who are writing about it or whatever it might be, or demonstrating how this all works, pay attention to that. I’ve attended good probably four, yes, four webinars in the last month on this not exact topic, but in this area of working with

the new ⁓ elements of artificial intelligence are coming into the workplace. And they’re all useful, slightly different. I learn something new from all of this that shapes my thinking, if you like. So it is a time to be aware that this is happening. And that’s where paying attention to McKinsey’s and so forth is really important.

Shel Holtz (20:38)

that can’t be commoditized with artificial intelligence that all of the consulting firms are gonna be using in roughly the same ways. ⁓ I think that differentiator is going to be critical ⁓ in the early thought process on all of this.

@nevillehobson (21:25)

to interpret, contextualize and act on these insights. That I totally agree is still true. I would add that for how long though I wonder, where’s only the humans who can do that. But it is a significant value of PR as Steve points out. And he talks about ⁓ who’s gonna survive, who’s gonna thrive in this era that’s coming. Well, in simple terms, those who embrace AI as an augmentation tool rather than resist its impact. You know what? That conversation was common.

just seven months ago. Now, though, I don’t believe it has the same, well, impact, frankly, where you talk about if you don’t do this, you won’t thrive, you resist, it’s going to happen no matter what. We’ve moved to the how rather than the what in that conversation, it seems to me, even those skeptics who don’t see this. So strategic advisory roles rather than commoditized execution work is what humans need to be thinking about, according to Steve. I don’t disagree with that.

Shel Holtz (22:53)

The post FIR #476: Rewiring the Consulting Business for AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.