When The Expert Doesn’t Exist

You read a mortgage story in a national newspaper. An expert is quoted. They have a plausible job title, a professional-looking biography and something sensible to say. There is one fairly basic assumption behind all of that: they exist.

Journalist Rob Waugh has been investigating what happens when they don’t. In his conversation with Josh Tracey-Wheeler on Accidentally Brilliant, Rob talks about fake experts getting into genuine editorial coverage, fictional writers appearing in established publications and what happens when nobody spots it until after publication.

This isn’t really a future AI problem. It is already happening.

Fake Experts Have Made It Into Real Media

Rob has looked at cases involving people presented as experts who simply weren’t what they appeared to be. Fake gardeners. Fake cleaning experts. People being quoted and presented to audiences as credible sources when the person or expertise behind the commentary does not stand up.

Most readers aren’t checking every source in everything they read. If somebody appears in a recognised newspaper, website or programme, we naturally assume somebody behind the scenes has already established who they are. That makes the problem considerably bigger when something fake gets through.

And it goes beyond experts being offered for comment. Rob also discusses a fictional writer who appeared in publications including Wired and Business Insider before the hoax was exposed. The publications that had used the writer suddenly became part of the story too.

Rob thinks that embarrassment is already changing behaviour. Nobody wants to be the editor who accidentally commissioned the AI writer. As generated biographies, profile photographs, websites and written content become more convincing, establishing who is actually behind something becomes harder.

What Should PR Do About It?

Josh puts that question directly to Rob. If fake experts and questionable content are getting genuine editorial coverage, is the PR industry doing enough to challenge it?

Rob’s view is that pretending there isn’t a problem is the wrong response. There is an incentive for people to create material that can generate coverage, traffic or links, and if that system can be exploited, somebody will try to exploit it.

For legitimate PR, he thinks that creates an opportunity to make the difference clearer.

Real expertise should be relatively easy to check. Who is this person? Why are they qualified to talk about the subject? Where have they worked? Can their experience be verified? Can they answer questions beyond the neat quote supplied in the original pitch?

For broadcast PR in particular, that last point matters. A spokesperson may be interviewed live on television or radio, producers may speak to them before making a booking and presenters can ask questions nobody sent over in advance. A plausible biography only gets you so far. The person actually needs to know what they are talking about.

That has always been true. What has changed is how easily something convincing can now be manufactured before anyone reaches that stage.

Getting It Wrong Has Consequences

Rob thinks the publicity around these cases matters because publishers do not want to be caught out. A news organisation exposing a fake expert is one thing. A news organisation discovering that it has published one is something else entirely.

That creates a strong incentive for journalists and editors to look more closely at who they are dealing with. It also gives PR agencies and communications teams a reason to make genuine expertise easier to recognise, not by filling pitches with endless credentials, but by making the source clear, checkable and credible from the beginning.

The people creating fake experts and AI-generated identities will probably get better at it too, which means this isn’t something one new verification tool is going to solve. It becomes an ongoing question of who and what can be trusted.

Being Real Suddenly Matters More

There is something slightly ridiculous about reaching a point where one advantage of a spokesperson is simply being able to prove that they exist. But that is part of what makes this conversation so interesting.

A genuine expert has a history. They have work people can find, experience that can be checked and other people who know them. They can be questioned beyond the paragraph that arrived in the original pitch.

AI can create something that looks convincing remarkably quickly. It cannot instantly create all of that.

For PR, the response to fake experts shouldn’t be to pretend they are somebody else’s problem. The more difficult it becomes to tell what is real, the more valuable genuinely credible expertise becomes.

Rob Waugh joins Josh Tracey-Wheeler on Accidentally Brilliant to talk about fake experts, fictional writers, AI-generated content and what it all means for journalism and PR.

Watch or listen to the full episode of Accidentally Brilliant →