Reporters are often inundated with automated, irrelevant email pitches. But how far is too far when using automation to secure media coverage?

In this episode, we discuss a recent, troubling scandal where a PR agency used AI-generated personas of non-existent PR reps, complete with fake names and headshots, to pitch stories on behalf of their clients.

One journalist, Maggie Harrison Dupré, uncovered the deception and documented it in a long and detailed article in Futurism — probably not the publicity those clients wanted!

Abbie emphasizes that while AI is an excellent tool for efficiency, it should never replace the authentic human connection, intellectual property, and trust that form the foundation of public relations.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on the Copper State of Mind podcast website.

Key Takeaways

• The overwhelming volume of AI-generated communication poses significant challenges to journalists and PR professionals alike.
• The "spray and pray" media pitching strategy has been worsened by AI, flooding reporters with irrelevant and deceptive spam that damages agency reputations.
• Transparency is a non-negotiable ethical obligation; agencies must disclose their AI practices to clients to avoid misrepresenting their brand.
• While AI can create operational efficiency, it cannot replace the genuine human relationships and intellectual property that PR professionals provide.
• As autonomous "agentic AI" continues to grow, the industry may eventually require authenticated, private channels to ensure human-to-human communication and filter out AI spam.

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We demystify the process and give you some helpful advice in Episode 19: "How to Hire a Public Relations Agency in Arizona: Insider Tips for Executives and Marketing Directors."

Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations firm in Phoenix, AZ.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a strategic communications consultancy for PR agencies and marketing firms, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy PRGN Presents: PR News & Views from the Public Relations Global Network, featuring conversations about strategic communications, marketing, and PR from PRGN, "the world’s local public relations agency.”

Are you really you? And if you are, how does anybody know? AI has gotten so good (sort of) at impersonating real people that it can sometimes trick an unsuspecting recipient of an email or a message. Sometimes this goes too far. And we have a very interesting situation that involves public relations. Abbie, what’s on your mind?

Yeah, that’s the part that’s most troublesome to me is it involves a public relations agency. So there’s a story circulating right now about a public relations firm utilizing the power of AI to create pitches to send to journalists. The unfortunate part is they also used AI to create the account person and photo to send along with that pitch. And so a very enterprising journalist was able to figure out that was a.

Maybe a little too good to be true, the person was a little bit too perfect, and in fact, followed up and learned that these. These were fake practitioners, real people behind the scenes, creating the prompts and create. But fake accounts. And so, you know, we’ve spent so much time in our various conversations talking about trust and credibility and reputation and thinking about it from a client perspective and how that’s our bread and butter, is making sure that our content and that we are creating on behalf of our clients is trustworthy and transparent and open and honest, and that we are only as good as our credible sources.

And so this is a bit troublesome to me that this is, you know, happening now. It could very well have been happening in other instances all along. But, you know, to call it out quite so much is where I think the. The lessons to be learned are maybe the most important part of where we’re at. But the thing about AI for me, and I think for ethical practitioners, is that it allows us to be quicker, it allows us to be more efficient.

It certainly gives us lots of options in terms of what we are creating. But it cannot and it never should ever replace the human connection. And I’ll drive that point home for as long as this is an active part of what we do, is that the human component, our intellectual property, that our brain power, our knowledge and expertise, has to be front and center when we’re using this. And that means it’s really me that you’re interacting with, it’s really my photo, it’s really my email. And that anything short of that is doing a disservice to what we do, certainly to our clients, and is not what I believe this, this technology is intended to do.

So the specific details of this case are interesting in part because the closer I look at it, the less sense any of it makes. I don’t fully understand the rationale, but let’s try to break it down because I think there’s a number of different types of people who listen to this podcast who could learn something from the case. So the first thing is there’s a journalist and the journalist is receiving a large amount of email pitches of stories that the person pitching or person. Now we have to put everything in quotes, right? So the ostensible PR representative sending the email wants the journalist to cover the stories. And the journalist, as many journalists will tell you, is inundated every single day with mostly irrelevant pitches, many of which are generated by AI. So they’re, they’re wordy and they pretend of familiarity, personalization. Oh, I really enjoyed your article on such and such.

We get these for podcasts all the time. We’ll talk about that maybe towards the end. So here’s a journalist who, whose job it is to cover certain sector, certain industry, certain beat and they’re flooded with these pitches. All right, that’s pretty normal. That actually happened long before AI, Just junior people were paid to go through, you know, Cision or Muck Rack or whatever, pull these lists and basically bulk email.

We, we call that spray and pray.

Yeah, it’s spam.

Throw as much out there as you can and hope something comes back.

It is a poor strategy that seems to be very, very prevalent. So the journalist takes a closer look because there’s number of pitches for the same topic. The same company that want them to write a story about this company and the interesting things they’re doing. It’s an AI related technology company and journalists being journalists, you know, pesky, curious, cynical creatures that they are, takes a closer look. So this, this headshot on the email doesn’t quite look right. It’s like a little too perfect as you said, you know, it’s very tiny, but you can, you know, right click View image, you can see the thing bigger and notice is at the bottom of the image there’s a watermark that says the image was generated from “this person does not exist dot com.”

Now, right there I’m like, okay, is this just farce? Like what are we even doing? This is just ridiculous at this point. In fact, a meta reading of the whole thing would be that this is an elaborate PR stunt to get a journalist who writes about AI to catch something and then turn it into a story. I don’t think that’s actually true because there’s a massive amount of reputational damage for the firm doing all of this. But anyway, all right, so they start to look at this and of course you can get AI generated or AI enhanced headshots.

Nothing inherently wrong with that. You might have one on your LinkedIn profile. You know, filters the lighting, it’s a little extra crisp, but it’s also not really you, but you do exist. These people, as it turns out, were completely non existent people. They had no online presence, they had no track record, no LinkedIn profiles to speak of, none of the things that somebody who’s actually in the PR business, who traffics and reputation and connections would have.

So the alarm bells go off, journalists keep sticking. It’s all in the story we can link to. It turns out these emails were being sent unbeknownst to clients by the PR firm representing them. Before we get any further into this, what are the ethics of that?

Yes. So let’s sort of look at that from two perspectives. So we’ve, we’ve spent a lot of time in the agency talking about our AI policies and what does it mean that we’re using AI and we have an internal policy that all of our team members agree to and that’s how we will use it. Making sure the human touch, it doesn’t go to a client as original work until we’ve reworked it, done all the things that we need to do.

Do we need to tell our clients that we’re using AI on their behalf? Well, that’s evolving as every client has a different philosophy about how to use AI for their purposes. And we’re starting to see it pop up in some of our new business presentations. They’re asking us about how we’re using it. We are seeing it pop up in some new contracts that, that talk about their intellectual property and how it’s being used in the large language models. If I’m putting in xyz company is launching a new product and it starts to create content for me.

What, what is that doing for that client’s, you know, proprietary information? So we, we’ve talked a lot about that. We, to some extent, how we pitch clients to the media, the way we write our story pitches, the relationship building that we have with our clients is our secret sauce. It’s our stuff, it’s what we do, it’s how we do it. We share with our clients that we’re doing this work. We don’t share that we’re pitching a particular reporter until we’ve secured that reporter. That’s how we do what we do.

The assumption of course, is that it is Abbie pitching or Alison Pitching or Justin pitching legitimately and not a made up person. Now I can’t make that jump very easily to a made up person doing that. So the ethical thing here for me is that where in the conversation did the, the team decide that this was an appropriate thing to do? And in the event that they thought it was appropriate, I believe they then the next step is notifying their clients that we are going to be using a system, you know, where we have, you know, generic emails going at you know what, however they wanted to do that, giving the client a little bit of an understanding that this is our policy, this is our process.

The fact that the clients didn’t know in and of itself, again, there are things that we do that, that, that aren’t necessary for the clients to know. They know we’re doing the work, how we do the work. The way we approach sometimes is, it’s just, it’s. There’s a, I guess it’s more of a gut feeling. You need to know this, you don’t need to know that. This is, this extends that to lying and making things up. I mean, the pitch is legit.

The company they were representing is legit. The agency that works on behalf of this client is legit. There was no reason to use made up people to do the work. And so the ethical element for me is we have an ethical obligation to practice above board, open and transparent. And that doesn’t mean fake Personas doing our work without identifying it. I mean, if, look, if they wanted to say at the beginning of this pitch, this is a Persona reflecting, you know, an account executive at XYZ Agency, that is okay. I mean there’s reasons to do that. Crisis community. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons you might want to do that, but to just assume it’s a real person.

There’s some technical reasons and there’s some probably misaligned incentives that are also at play here. And I think this is useful to think about both from the client’s perspective and the agency’s perspective. So in a world where clients come to a PR firm expecting miraculous results, they’re usually investing a healthy amount of money on the premise that this firm is going to enhance their reputation and get them featured in the right places, help grow their business, the firm is now on the hook for delivering those results.

In a world where there is so much more noise, the volume, the sheer volume of AI generated slop that you have to cut through both to get to the journalist to have them even consider your sources as well as then to get from the publication to the audience, which is where the magic is supposed to happen. I mean, who cares at the end of the day, if the journalist knows you exist? You want your clients and customers or the public, whoever the target of a campaign is, to know you exist.

And there’s just a lot of difficulty and friction and, and all the things. And I can imagine, and I don’t. I am making this up and projecting. So I. It’s very irresponsible. I don’t know what was actually going on for them, but I can imagine a conversation something along the lines of, you know, our competitors. The agency is saying our competitors are just spamming the heck out of reporters. And some of them are getting burned, by the way, because when they get caught, their sending domains get blocked. They get reported as spam, even when they’re not spam. You know, what we should do is what some of these bulk email people do and create multiple sending domains so that, you know, if.

If something happens to one of our email addresses, you know, it hasn’t taken down our whole business. You know, clients expect us to be pushing their stuff out there. We have to protect ourselves by creating all these layers. And by the way, this is a conversation that happens with marketing departments and boardrooms of every brand on earth all the time. How are we going to do the kind of outreach we need to do? How are we going to build the relationships?

And there’s some gray areas here, right? So maybe they thought, okay, well, you know, what if we’re going to the trouble of setting up these additional email accounts so that we can send multiple places, maybe we’re not trying to mislead anybody. We just don’t, you know, if one gets blacklisted, we need to have others available. Maybe we should create multiple Personas that those emails are coming from. Wouldn’t that be nice? We can have a whole array of bright young account people. You know, we’ll make our agency look good, too. We have 15 junior account people that we’ve put onto this. And even if we’re just impressing the client, maybe we should do that. And I see you shaking your head because this is exactly where things go wrong. Ego creeps in and you start compromising on your ethics and on your principles. So a gray area becomes a black hat, no go zone very quickly.

Then, of course, you flip it. And from the journalist’s point of view, this is just another reason why their job is impossible. Who could believe anyone about anything ever? And there’s so much noise. It’s you know, we talk about people “going postal” when the overwhelming daily flood of mail that just never seems to stop. We should talk about people “going journo” when it just, they crack because there’s just too much.

Well, and I think, I think so. So, look, technology, let’s not even talk. Let’s just, generally speaking, talk about technology. We know technology is a benefit to what we do, and it is probably our biggest challenge as well. Yes, email gets spammed out, we get hacked, we get a spam email, we click on it and it, you know, takes control of our computers. We get phone calls, 900 phone calls a day from, as my sister refers to her boyfriend, potential spam. Right. I mean, they’re, they’re just, it’s a necessary evil.

But we need, we, we work within that technology to figure it out. So, yes, if you’re sending and you’re spray and praying and you’re getting your email domain has been blocked by the journalist, it deserves to be, A, because you’ve spammed them. B, creating another domain to email from in itself is not the issue for me if it’s identifiable. Like, like we send emails out from hmapr. That’s right. But I also have in the past sent out emails using a client’s domain, an invitation to an event or something. But it is, it is [email protected]

and client.com has approved me sending on their behalf with their domain. And it’s, it’s above board. There are, there are reasons to create different email exchanges. I get all of that. Right. It, to me, this, this, this borderline, you know, the, the we needed to figure out a way to break through part isn’t wrong. But be honest about it. I mean, but, you know, if so now. So they’ve got 15 personalities that they’ve created.

If I go to the website, I don’t see 15 people. I, the journalist obviously wants the topics that they’re pitching enough that the journalist opened them up because she thought they weren’t interesting enough. But the pattern created the challenge. We are all being asked to be faster, more creative, less resources, all sorts of things. The whole industry is being challenged in a variety of different ways.

But where we have to land, we being communications professionals, PR practitioners, have to land always is trust and credibility. And when that gets broken, intentionally or unintentionally, we all have to build back up from that. And to me, that if I do not want anything that anyone on my team is sending out to ever be called into question, is it really you, Abbie? Is that really you now? It could look. I mean, I get plenty of that question anyway because my email gets.

What’s the word? Phished? Spoofed. Spoofed, Whatever. The word is where someone else sends thinking it’s me, right? That happens all the time. So the fact that I’m getting questioned doesn’t bother me. No, I did not send that. That wasn’t really me. This is what I really sent you. I’m happy for that. But it’s still me. It’s still Abbie’s reputation, and Abbie can protect her reputation if it is Angela, and Angela doesn’t really exist, that’s where my challenges are.

Well, and this is. As we head towards the end of this conversation, this is where there is a possible future that is, in fact brighter for all of us than the present. Although I would be wary of any hype about what I’m about to say. Take everything with a grain of salt. So, a PR agency, as you noted in the thoughts you sent me prior to starting to record here, a PR agency is an agent in the very real sense. They operate as you on your behalf.

And agents as a concept is a very interesting thing with a lot of complexity to the relationship. It involves trust. It involves some contractual obligations sometimes, but also a kind of fiduciary responsibility in many cases where you are to act in good faith in the best interest, as if you were the client. We now have just to bring another layer of technobabble into the conversation. We have agentic AI. We have AI bots which can operate independently and autonomously and do things on your behalf, much like a human agency might have done.

Maybe not much like. But in any case, they could do things for you, right? You can set them up to do stuff. Maybe the bright spot of the future is if your agentic bots are being filtered by my agentic bots. And I have a whole entire private channel that only allows authenticated human. I don’t know what with some sort of fingerprint on the blockchain, but I know you’re a real person. If you’re in this channel and everything else gets diverted, your junk bots are being screened by my bots, which then have. I’ve given rules that will filter something. So it’s a little bit like when only your friends have your number, you can answer the phone, right? But since anybody, anywhere.

In fact, in the middle of this recording, I saw my phone rang. I never answered my phone. No real person is ever actually calling me. But it popped up and it said, Western Union, Phoenix. I’m like, there’s definitely a spammer on the other end of that. I don’t even know what that is, but when you call me Abbie, your face pops up. I know it’s you. The whole history of interaction is there. That’s what we need. We need a private, dedicated, secure channel for authenticated human communications. And all the rest of the crap is going to be handled by our crap busters.

Trademark, registered, copyrighted.

You know, they’ll let us know. Crapbusters. AI. You heard it here first. I don’t know. I think on the one hand, but we also may not make it that far. Like, we, we may go extinct before we ever get around. Because let’s be honest, there is a lot of the tech that is. I mentioned misaligned interests earlier, that is not, does not have our best interest in mind. The companies who build a lot of this stuff have been mining our data and doing nefarious things for years. Which, by the way, is why these scammers have my email. But I digress. In any case, human trust, we somehow have to find a way to protect it. Maybe it’s not always needed, but when it is, it really matters.

Yeah, and I guess for me, the, the, the, you know, the, the bottom line here is I, I can. If, if, if we wanted to align this, this particular situation with the, you know, agentic AI and, and chatbots and other things that we have created that are answering questions for us and doing these things for us, we know that that’s what they’re doing. We know when we’re, when a chat bottle pops up on a screen, we are not talking to a human being.

We know we’re getting a script based on the keywords that we put in. And, and we know that, and we’ve chosen to engage with that, with that understanding. And if we want a human being, we still have to, you know, push one, push two, hit pound, you know, a thousand times on the phone number to actually get to somebody who is still reading off of a script based on what you have asked them to, you know, but we know this, this is not being, this is not deceptive practices. This is. We know that I, if the future is going to be that an accepted practice is that we will create Personas to assist us in our story pitching and that if a reporter expresses interest, there is a prompt that will then loop in the human to do the follow up.

And the follow up is, thank you, Adrian, for your interest. That was my Persona. Angela, who initially pitched you, this is Abbie I’m going to take over from here. It’s upfront, it’s transparent, it’s available. It’s not where I’d like to see it go. It’s not going to be something that I will immediately jump on if it becomes common practice. Too much of what we do and what I believe is our strengths at our firm is our relationships, the ones that have been built over time.

The type when a client calls and says we’ve got an issue and we need to reach out and do you have those contacts? And we do, and we can, and we will do that is never going to be replaced by, by the bot, by the. By the Persona. And when that, if it becomes common practice, we’ll rethink what we’re doing. I think this whole issue brings up a very interesting debate for all of us. We’ve been discussing fake news.

We’ve been discussing how do we protect against information that’s out there that isn’t what we created? And now we have to also account for information that is about us, but is being sent out by someone that isn’t us, and that’s going to challenge all of us for quite some time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It’s easy to do. Just click the “Share” button and in the app you’re listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.FM, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona. For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.FM, I’m Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others, if you choose to do so. We hope you’ll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.