AI tools like Google Gemini Omni are making it faster, cheaper and easier to create convincing fake content, and launch smear campaigns, at scale. The organisations most likely to withstand such reputational attacks will be those with enough credibility that people instinctively believe them when they say: “that’s not who we are”. 1440’s Robin Grainger discusses.
The Mark Twain line that “a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth has barely got its boots on,” may at last be showing its age. Now, video, a news article, even an event, can be conjured up and seen by millions, while the truth lies slumbering in its bed.
One of the centrepieces of Google’s I/O tech summit last week, was off Gemini Omni, an “anything to anything” AI model. That means it can take inputs in any format: photos, videos, audio, text, and add AI-generated elements to them. People can use it to doctor pictures, audio and video in seconds. A boon for would-be artists to flex their creative chops it may be. Yet it also significantly lowers the bar for anyone to create compelling fake (or near-fake) content, at low cost and on a vast scale.
The implications for the business of reputation are obvious. Anyone who wants to, could fabricate an incident, a video statement or a news report, that looks compelling enough for others to share online. For instance, it would be easy for critics to fabricate a CEO saying their products are “crap”.
By the time the business cottons on, those words and images might be part of countless online conversations.
In that environment, conventional issues-management approaches, like holding statements and rebuttals, look slow and oddly beside the point.
The best defence against faked smears may simply be to say, “That wasn’t us. We’d never do that”.
The ability to say that, credibly, means sounding believable, and that could be the ultimate test of an organisation’s reputation.
Rising to the ultimate test
Getting to this point takes planning. It doesn’t happen by itself.
To sound credible when the chips are down, organisations need reputational credit built up first, in quieter times. This involves earning the trust and respect of the real people and organisations – customers, partners, stakeholders and others – whose opinions are unlikely to change overnight.
At the same time, they need a crisis plan setting out how to respond when real issues emerge. This should set out the points public statements need to cover, how they’re delivered, tone of voice, the spokesperson, and so on.
The goal here is not to lay down hard-and-fast templates, but to achieve clarity and consistency.
Being clear and consistent in responding to real issues makes it easier to present malicious lies as precisely that. On the other hand, vagueness and inconsistency, shaped by rushed decisions – an over-reaction here, an obfuscation there – could open up space for detractors to exploit. They just need to look credible enough.
Planning matters
As Guy has noted elsewhere on this blog, in a crisis, people don’t think straight. Making plans when things are quieter allows hard choices to be made by calm minds without the pressure of outside scrutiny.
The mass availability of AI tools like Gemini Omni should make crisis and issues management planning more important.
Those who seek to smear a reputation only need to be lucky once. Those protecting them need to be lucky all the time. Tools like Gemini Omni make it easier to industrialise these attacks. But it’s far harder to land reputational blows – AI-powered or otherwise – on organisations which can call out the fakes, and be believed.
We help organisations get ahead of threats and build strong reputations by reaching the people they need to influence. Get in touch to find out more.