… I was guest lecturing (coffee in hand!) to students in the US on AI, strategic comms and corporate responsibility, as part of their Media Trends course – and having a blast!
A big thank you to Tanya Ryan, Ph.D. and Winona State University Communication StudiesWinona State University for having me, and to all students for joining! It was an absolute pleasure.
A few of the themes we explored:
🤖 The attention paradox: AI can make comms faster, cheaper and easier to scale. Human attention, judgment and trust don’t scale in quite the same way.
📰 AI in journalism & PR: from City AM‘s “AI slop” campaign to Press Gazette‘s investigation into fake experts & AI-generated content, and Futurism’s reporting on fake journalists and sources – what happens to transparency, authorship and trust when we can no longer be sure who, or what, is behind the information?
🔎 Provenance, disclosure and accountability: watermarks and detection tools can provide useful signals, but they don’t answer the bigger question of who exercised judgment and who is ultimately responsible.
🧠 The augmented communicator: using AI to augment research, thinking & execution while keeping human judgment, context and accountability where they matter most.
🏢 AI ethics beyond the individual: responsible AI use can’t depend on every employee making the right call independently. Leadership, clear policies, governance and oversight matter too.
It was also great to revisit some of the work we did through the Chartered Institute of Public Relations#AIinPR Panel, which I had the pleasure of being part of. The technology has moved incredibly quickly, but many of the questions we were asking around ethics, transparency and accountability remain just as relevant.
And these questions go well beyond comms. How organizations use AI is increasingly a question of leadership, governance and corporate responsibility, with communicators sitting at the intersection of what an organization does, what it says, and what its stakeholders ultimately trust.
Lots covered, and exactly the kind of discussion I love bringing into the classroom!
A shoutout to Ahmet Aksoy, Ph.D. who made the introduction (thank you again!) and knows how much I enjoy guest lecturing and sharing practical PR and comms experience with students. We had some great questions along the way, which always brings different perspectives to the table and gives me plenty to think about too.
Thank you to everyone again, hope it was an interesting session. 🙂
Here’s to the next one!
#AI#AIinPR#StrategicCommunications#PublicRelations#AIEthics#CorporateResponsibility#FreelancePR#Comms
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