Reputation management in the age of AI misinformation

AI-generated misinformation is already impacting business, politics and communicators. For instance, in May, a deepfake photo of an explosion at the Pentagon went viral on Twitter, boosted by Russian state media. The S&P 500 briefly dropped three-tenths of a percentage point before the relevant PR pros managed to get the situation under control.
 
And this is only the tip of the AI misinformation iceberg.
 
The bad news is, there are no silver bullets. No single policy, technical solution or piece of legislation is going to fix the problem.
 
The good news is, as trusted communication counsellors, we’re uniquely positioned to help our organizations and clients navigate the AI misinformation age.
 
Here’s how:
 
✅ Embrace AI
AI is transforming the communications landscape, just like social media in the early 2000s. Today, being able to have an intelligent conversation about social media’s role in a comms strategy is part and parcel of being a professional communicator. AI is the same.
 
By understanding its strengths, its potential and its numerous limitations, we can then bring our very human communications expertise and judgement to bear on the issue of AI-generated misinformation.
 
✅ Ask questions
One of the most valuable things communicators bring to the table is a strategic mindset. That frequently means asking hard questions and thinking about the things nobody else is considering. Some questions worth asking are:
🔸 How effective is our organization or client at monitoring its reputation and spotting misinformation?
🔸 Do employees and key stakeholders know how to recognize misinformation — AI or otherwise — and discern between fact and fake?
🔸 How are other functions and disciplines in my organization thinking about AI? Your colleagues in engineering, sales, legal or IT may have very different and valuable perspectives on the technology. It’s worth taking time to understand them.
 
✅ Plan
At its core, dealing with any kind of misinformation — whether human or AI-generated — is potentially a crisis situation. Therefore, the time to build your plan, your relationships and have conversations about how to respond to misinformation is before the crisis, not during.
 
Put pen to paper, and with those stakeholders, work through the processes and procedures to do things like:
🔸 Rapidly validate information, because not every unflattering video is going to be a deep fake.
🔸 Determine when to spend time and resources responding to misinformation, and when to ignore it.
🔸 Figure out how to rapidly get factual information out to your key stakeholders.
 
💡With any new disruptive technology there are always challenges and generative AI is no different. As professional communicators, we owe it to ourselves and those we support to both understand the opportunities and to use our skills and expertise to understand and mitigate the risks.
 
📷Memyselfaneye Pixabay
 
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