“If You're Using Fictional AI Experts in PR Stories, Grow Up”: HuffPost's Dayna McAlpine on the Credibility Cost of Using Fake Experts in Press Releases

In an exclusive ICS podcast interview, HuffPost UK deputy editor Dayna McAlpine spoke with Digital PR Manager Grace Taylor-Clarke about the rise of fictional experts in PR campaigns, trust between journalists and PR pros and why real expertise still wins when it comes to earning media coverage.

With journalists under pressure to do significantly more with much fewer resources, and PR professionals tasked to earn more and better media coverage, it's of little surprise that some practitioners make the decision to cut corners - with implications for the relationships between the media, brands, agencies and the reading public

In January, Press Gazette named more than 50 "experts" featured in PR campaigns who don’t exist - who are entirely AI-generated or fake. 

Between them, they had been quoted over 1,000 times across UK newspapers, magazines and websites. 

The list remains live, and the trade title is asking journalists and PRs to flag any more they spot, so the list (and the topic) may only get bigger.

To explore this still-ongoing topic, digital PR manager Grace Taylor-Clarke hosted a podcast with Dayna McAlpine, deputy editor of HuffPost UK. 

As Dayna has spent more than a decade covering sex and relationships, modern wellness and UK lifestyle, she's seen every possible type of pitch under the sun, and we were grateful to get her first-hand thoughts on the troubling trend of brands and agencies using fictional AI experts.

AI Experts in Digital PR

To be clear about what we mean here: when we say "AI experts" in this blog, we're resolutely not talking about specialists in artificial intelligence as a discipline.

Rather, we're referring to fictional personas conjured up by AI to give PR stories a name and a (fake!) face, and/or a quote attributed to a credentialed-sounding professional that a brand or agency has generated. 

This is in contrast to the legitimate use of a REAL internal expert with real insights, or a partnership with a brand ambassador or campaign figurehead.

Dayna's thoughts on this are pretty stark. As she says in the episode,:

"If you're using AI experts - grow up."

Fake Experts, Fake PR - The Cost to Credibility

As Dayna states on the podcast, she thinks the industry should talk about the topic more, not less. Even, and especially, when news outlets have taken fake expertise at face value.

Her advice as a first step is to focus on potentially mundane but quick and effective sense-checks: does the "expert" have a LinkedIn profile, a paper trail and an online footprint - has the person ever actually published anything?

For PR professionals and brands, being caught out has implications.

"Once you're caught, you're caught," as Dayna says - and the damage does not stay contained to the results of featuring one erroneous quote:

"the second you're caught out, it completely discredits everything you've done ... how can I trust that what I'm getting back is one hundred percent genuine?"

In the pod, Grace asked whether the industry has moved from "trust until proven wrong" to "guilty until proven human".

While Dayna liked the phrase, she went on to say that one of the biggest impacts could be on early-career PR professionals, as editors now lean towards experts and PR contacts with a track record, which makes it harder for qualified newcomers to break in. 

"A real minefield," she called it.

For those trying to build a reputation in PR, this whole trend makes things harder but for those "guilty" of using AI experts, the question is whether their reputation will ever recover - not just with an individual journalist or publication, but with their network and the wider ecosystem.

As Dayna says:

"Journalism isn't as big a pond as what people think. It's more like a puddle."

Journalists meet, have drinks and compare notes - particularly in stressful times with stretched resources. So - when PR professionals feed one journo a fabricated expert, others tend to hear about it.

As Dayna says on the pod, she keeps an informal version of this in her head:

"I've got plenty of PRs in my little black book that I know would never try and feed me an AI expert."

On the flip side, there are now public examples of less-trusted sources, as Press Gazette's watchlist is shared across the industry.

Once you are on a list like this, second chances feel unlikely - not least because there are so many PR professionals sharing stories with journos. It isn't as if there's a shortage of potential stories, hooks, comments and perspectives, and nobody likes being the wool being pulled over their eyes.

Stretched Resources Mean Trust is More Important than Ever

A fabricated-but-plausible expert is designed precisely to slip past a journalist who, in Dayna's case, was sitting on 940 unread emails from the previous couple of days with no time to verify every name.

In many cases it seems that the fake AI expert shortcut succeeds because the journo on the other end is juggling more work than ever, and putting trust into people and campaigns that appear credible.  

When journalists feel their trust has been exploited, it is little wonder that doors close for PR pros using invented team members or fictional experts.

On the agency side, a good chunk of modern digital PR runs on expert comment on fast-moving topics: reactive pitches at volume, a quotable specialist produced on demand to hook onto whatever is trending by mid-morning.

It feels like the pressure is sharpest at smaller, high-churn PR agencies who really can't afford to lose a single client. 

You can get a sense of this desperation straight off their Glassdoor reviews - hothouse cultures, aggressive coverage targets, junior staff carrying coverage or link quotas they have little realistic chance of hitting through fully honest methods.

In that environment, inventing an AI expert starts to look efficient, even though it is still indefensible, short-termist and (ultimately) a false economy.

Why ICS-digital Uses Real, Human Experts and Original Data

We work most often in tightly regulated, highly competitive sectors - finance, law, health and iGaming among them - where credibility is what keeps a campaign on the right side of regulations. But this discipline also means our PR campaigns tend to be more robust and authoritative, with plenty of real proof points.

In the sectors ICS-digital works in, you can't bluff a compliance team or a regulator (and you should not want to!), but this rigour forces a higher standard of substance into the work from the outset.

In practice, that runs from commissioning genuine research, up to and including full clinical trials where a client's product calls for it, through to putting real internal client experts forward. It matters most for reactive comment, where a named, verifiable specialist beats an invented one every time - at least in terms of actual substance and campaign future-proofing.

When the trading brand IG needed to own fast-moving finance and economy stories, building reactive comment around its real experts and genuine analysis meant we earned more than 100 pieces of global coverage in two months and a 26% rise in top-three ranking keywords, with day-and-date content that took Featured Snippets ahead of competitors.

A fabricated quote earns none of that and, if found out, burns the trust that makes other campaigns possible. 

To read more about what works, scales and compounds in reactive comment for digital PR for highly regulated sectors, take a look at the IG case study.

At the more playful end of digital PR, the same principle covers exclusive interviews with athletes, footballers, influencers, celebs and reality TV names - again, real people with real stories in terms of legal/reputational repercussions.

This authenticity matters given how entwined digital PR is with SEO. 

With digital PR campaigns often designed to earn links to support SEO initiatives first and foremost, the signals Dayna checks including a real social presence, published work, a verifiable trail - line up closely with what Google and the AI answer engines lean on when deciding who counts as authoritative.

More than that, it is the same thinking behind how E-E-A-T factors into SEO-driven content and, crucially, the authority side of what we do as part of our Distinctiveness Intelligence proposition for AI visibility: being clear about who or what an entity is, and earning corroboration from trusted sites.

Summing Up

With all of this going on, there is still scope to build real relationships with journalists - based on original, authentic data and brand representatives who exist, and who have personal perspectives that match the stories journos want to tell.

Ultimately, people respond to people, as Dayna says:

"People like people... people like human experience. And that's something that AI can never give us."

On the use of experts in digital PR specifically, Dayna was plainer still: "I'm looking for your skills, not for make-believe."

The PR professionals and digital agencies that come out of this period in decent shape will be the ones treating real expertise and real relationships as an asset rather than a cost. Everyone else is one verification check - or one public watchlist, in the case of Press Gazette's piece - away from being crossed off someone's little black book.

There are plenty of other topics to get to grips with in the podcast episode - subject lines, the etiquette of chasing coverage, where Substack fits in and much more. Listen to the full conversation with Dayna McAlpine on the ICS podcast. Of course, our thanks again go out to Dayna for taking part!

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