"Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do." Potter Stewart

Article #1

The News, Media Ethics And ChatGPT For PR And Comms Work

Curtis Sparrer. May 30, 2023,07:45am EDT

ChatGPT has been an absolute sensation since its launch in November 2022. It brings to bear an impressive array of capabilities, from writing software code to creating hipster craft cocktail recipes. Its generative artificial intelligence (AI) cousins, including Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI, deliver similar features and functionality.

At the core of that functionality—no matter what AI you choose—is the ability to take instructions (called prompts) and turn those into readable content. It can be used for a wide variety of purposes, but we all know that its most common application is that of writing. Reams of column inches have already been written about how it can save time on creating everything from memos to video scripts, press releases, poetry and more.

Good Times For Bottom-Feeders

It is also being used to write for media outlets and the broader internet, at times leading to pretty disastrous results and no small amount of controversy.

Tech news website CNET took a swing at writing some of their content with ChatGPT—and didn’t bother to tell anyone about it. This resulted in significant backlash and negative media coverage, and it was revealed that 41 of the 77 articles that were written with AI—published under a rather opaque “staff” byline—contained factual errors, forcing the publication to issue multiple corrections.

More recently, the German publication Die Aktuelle—which looks not too dissimilar to celeb-stalking rags like the National Enquirer—ran a story on seven-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, which was fabricated using AI. The phony “interview” (paywall) with the incapacitated former driver was called out by his family as being false. The parent company issued an apology, and the editor was rightfully removed from her job. Not inconsequentially, the publisher is now exposed to some meaningful legal liability, with a lawsuit potentially in the works.

All of this evidence points to the fact that generative AI is already a boon for the bottom-feeders. This applies to the news industry, as well as the internet at large. Those who operate bots and content farms or write product descriptions and landing pages can now use ChatGPT and its cohort products to promulgate whatever reckless, inaccurate content that they wish, with little currently in the way of consequences. Surely AI tools are being used by bad actors to advance conspiracy theories and hate speech online, and many of these shady characters will seek to hide their use of AI and present it as genuine, original content.

After all, a major publisher or media outlet might act responsibly when caught using AI—or admit it upfront—but millions, even billions, of other pages on the internet will likely get away with publishing dubious or outright inaccurate information generated by AI.

Impact On The Media

Against this backdrop of huge turmoil and limited accountability, the journalism industry is trying to muster a response. Content publishers in the form of major media outlets are hoping that chatbot-assisted search will send additional users to their content, and journalism organizations (paywall) are now grappling with ethical considerations around the use of AI in the profession. In an era when print journalism is struggling financially, the ability of AI-powered search to direct traffic (and thus revenue) to the “big guys” could be the final nail in the coffin for many a local newspaper or fringe media outlet.

To further explore this issue, my agency hosted a roundtable discussion at the San Francisco Press Club (of which I am president) with top journalists, as well as tech companies. Panelists included representatives from AFP, CNET/ZDNet, MarketWatch, Reuters, the San Francisco Examiner, VentureBeat, WIRED and Microsoft. Moderated by Rachel Metz of Bloomberg, the session looked at the most current topics at the intersection of journalism and AI.

Key takeaways from the discussion, which had an audience of over 100 communications pros and media influencers, were that large news operations are already well into experimenting with the use of AI in gathering more information quickly. Use cases like developing “net new” products, as well as researching financial news and company data, are already being experimented with. At the same time, reputable news organizations are doing their best to tread carefully around issues like disinformation and accuracy, as well as disclosing to the audience that AI is being used for public-facing news content.

The Future

While my own experience with using ChatGPT for specific elements of public relations (PR) and comms work has shown promise, I think it will be a number of years until AI does the heavy lifting in the area of writing and reporting. This also goes for both sides of the PR equation—which means that we’re far from using generative AI to write pitches and press releases and to solicit media coverage—which is, of course, PR’s bread and butter. Similarly, journalists shouldn’t be ready to surrender their jobs to news-reporting bots, because the accuracy and the trust simply are not there—not to mention the lack of human touch and the ability to have a “BS detector” when appropriate.

Even as we lean into AI as an industry, numerous concerns remain. This means that we can enjoy some degree of near-term job security as we seek to figure out how to live with this highly disruptive technology, from both practical and ethical perspectives. In a rapidly changing world, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Article #2

4 takeaways from the Dominion v. Fox settlement

Washington Post Staff writer April 18, 2023 at 6:45 p.m. EDT

The long-anticipated defamation trial in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News ended before it truly began Tuesday, with a judge announcing the two sides had agreed to a settlement. Dominion says Fox has agreed to pay $787.5 million — nearly half of the $1.6 billion Dominion sought.

At issue in the case were false claims that Fox aired about Dominion related to former president Donald Trump’s false accusations about the 2020 election being stolen. Dominion had to prove not only that the claims weren’t true — which it did — but that Fox’s actions met the legal standard of “actual malice,” meaning that it knew better or that it showed a reckless disregard for the truth.

The settlement, the full terms of which weren’t immediately clear and could remain shrouded, will spare Fox a lengthy spectacle delving into those issues. But it came after ugly disclosures about the cable news leader.

Below are some takeaways:

The damage done

The name of the game for Fox and its owners in such situations — be it the British phone-hacking scandal, sexual misconduct, gender discrimination cases or others — is almost always to settle. Often, and evidently by design, that deprives us of a true hearing on the merits of the allegations.

But in this case Fox didn’t reach a settlement until after thoroughly damaging revelations via the legal discovery process and early court maneuvers. The documentation in the case showed that many at Fox indeed knew better about the conspiracy theories the network aired, that it chose to air them anyway in the name of appealing to an audience that believed these claims and wanted to believe Trump had won, and that even Fox’s news product toed the company’s political line.

The judge also ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that the claims Fox aired were false.

What will continue to linger over the network are the lessons of all that evidence. Given what we’ve learned about Fox’s focus on its business model, other outlets will view its news product — its journalism — accordingly. It reinforced the idea that the shows put on by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are just that: shows tailored to an audience, and they might not reflect what the hosts or the people behind the scenes actually know or believe.

Perhaps as much as anything, the case reflected the control Trump has over the conservative movement, given the fear Fox demonstrated of what Trump could do to it — a fear that echoes the broader Republican Party’s posture toward Trump.

Of course, whether Fox viewers will ever consume any of that is another matter. Fox covered the trial sparingly after initially barring even its media reporter from weighing in. The conservative media ecosystem is exceedingly insular. Just as Fox capitalized on its audience’s false beliefs about voter fraud — even as such claims had been routinely debunked elsewhere — it will probably benefit from their disinterest in learning what just happened at their favored cable news outlet.

What’s clear is that Dominion, while having understandable motives to settle, struck perhaps the most significant blow to date against Fox well before it agreed to the deal.

The scale of the settlement

There remain questions about the settlement beyond the dollar figure. But a big one was answered shortly after it was announced. The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr reports that Fox says it will not be required to issue an on-air apology. (Dominion’s lawyers did not address this.)

It is notable that Fox News said in its post-settlement press statement that “we acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” But that acknowledgment is pretty thin gruel if it’s the only mention Fox gives about its conduct. It’s merely stating something that the court said without necessarily endorsing it. (Fox media reporter Howard Kurtz did say on-air after the settlement that the allegations were “obviously false. Those were conspiracy theories.”)

Dominion sought to cast Fox’s statement as more significant, with chief executive John Poulos saying that “Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion.”

But even if you recognize that Fox was admitting the statements were false, the network did not address whether those statements were lies. “Lies have consequences,” Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson said, adding: “Today represents a ringing endorsement for truth and for democracy.”

As for the dollar figure, it’s surely one of the largest in history for a defamation suit (the totals in such suits often remain confidential). It also compares to some estimates of the total cost of the phone-hacking scandal last decade that cost Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as much as $1 billion.

Fox, which owns the nation’s leading cable news outlet, had $4 billion in cash in its last financial filing, meaning it would seem to be able to cover such a large payout. But it’s a huge blow to the bottom line.

What’s next?

And it might not be the end of it. While the news of the settlement is hugely significant, there’s more to come — even on this specific issue.

Fox still has to contend with a similar lawsuit from another voting technology company, Smartmatic. The company was often lumped in with Dominion while the false claims were made on Fox, and in some cases the claims against Smartmatic arguably went further.

A New York judge last month allowed Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit to move forward. The size of the payout in the Dominion case will only make the stakes of this next case even larger.

Another major issue looming over Fox is what its shareholders might do. Shareholders can sue the network over how its decisions damaged their assets. One of them filed suit this month. Others have demanded company records.

While the Dominion payout might not severely hamper Fox, the combination of all of these things could exact a growing and much larger toll. And as far as Fox is concerned, the issue as a whole isn’t completely settled. What just happened suggests it’s not exactly fighting from a position of strength.

Dominion says it’s not done, either, with lawyer Stephen Shackelford saying: “We’ve got some other people who have some accountability coming toward them. And we’ll move right on to the next one.”

Dominion is also suing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who promoted the false election claims on Fox and elsewhere. (Lindell’s fate would also seem to matter greatly to Fox, given that documents in the Dominion case show Fox referring to him as the network’s top advertiser.)

Late missteps from Fox

Before the two sides were able to reach an agreement, Fox repeatedly earned the ire of the judge, including on Tuesday.

Judge Eric M. Davis removed Fox communications executive and spokeswoman Caley Cronin from the courtroom after she was caught taking pictures. Cameras and tweeting from the courtroom were forbidden during the trial, which was being held without video or audio recording.

Davis said that when admonished, Cronin “turned on everybody else” and said others were “actively tweeting in the courtroom.” So Davis took the opportunity to remind everyone of the rules and assure those in the courtroom that they would be enforced.

Davis last week sharply rebuked Fox’s lawyers and ordered an investigation after Dominion said Fox obscured Murdoch’s status as an officer at Fox News and the Fox Corp. Dominion said Murdoch’s actual status would have entitled it to more evidence in the case. Davis said Fox had a “credibility problem” and that the issue might have influenced his own previous decisions.

Fox later apologized to the judge while attributing the omission to a “misunderstanding.” Davis earlier Tuesday had appointed a special master to look into whether Fox abided by its obligations to produce the documents and communications it was required to.

The situations reinforced that the proceedings were a growing headache for Fox — and one Fox had all kinds of reasons to try to get rid of.

Article #3

Ethics in journalism and public relations: It’s personal

By Scott Brooks. October 10, 2022

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed (or published); everything else is Public Relations.” – Attributed to George Orwell

That quote by author George Orwell has been making the rounds on the internet and social media for the last decade. I saw it on a friend’s social media feed recently. The problem is nobody can seem to be sure he actually said it. Some sources just take it as the gospel that he did. Others on the internet call it into question but can’t provide any evidence to the contrary.

But if Orwell didn’t say it, or something like it, does it make the quote inaccurate? Or is “close enough” indeed close enough?

That lies at the heart of the great dilemma facing both journalists and public relations practitioners in the age of the internet and social media. How do you know what to believe anymore, and who is making the rules about “truth”?

Next question – Why talk about it now? September is Ethics Month for the Public Relations Society of America. I’m the Ethics Officer for the Volunteer PRSA chapter in Knoxville.

In my 30 years as an adult in the workforce, I’ve been on both sides – 15 years as a journalist in broadcast and print, and the last 15 or so in public relations. In my estimation, the majority of journalists and public relations practitioners are committed to telling the truth. Most news outlets have a Code of Ethics, as does PRSA.

I can also honestly say that I’ve seen examples from both professions of people who were so determined to tell their version of the truth that they forgot the importance of fairness and avoiding personal interests – two values that are basic tenets of ethics.

And herein lies the problem for both journalism and public relations professions, which goes back decades, maybe hundreds of years – back to when muckrakers would sacrifice the truth for the sake of selling papers. Today, the truth can be clouded in the interest of getting clicks on a web story.

So, whose job is it to police the truth? Well, the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 likely muddied the waters a bit. While that FCC rule applied mainly to broadcast news, the idea that both sides of a story deserve to be told seems to be lost in modern day political journalism and the quest for clicks.

In public relations, we are often accused of being biased toward our employers and clients. In fact, part of our job is to tell the stories we think will be best for those we represent. But I believe most PR professionals are able to draw the line when it comes to telling the truth.

Back to the supposed Orwell quote – if journalism AND public relations is all about getting people to read or watch our version of a story, and not about the search for truth, is there any difference between journalism and public relations? I’d submit that both have an ethical duty to tell the truth and to manage the consequences.

So, who decides? At the very least, I think we all have a duty to ask questions and look for the truth in everything. Socrates said it best – “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I found that on the internet, so it must be true.

Article #4

The Bruce Willis Deepfake Is Everyone’s Problem

There’s a fight brewing over how Hollywood stars can protect their identities. But it’s not just actors who should be paying attention.

By Will Bedingfield October 17, 2022

JEAN-LUC GODARD ONCE claimed, regarding cinema, “When I die, it will be the end.” Godard passed away last month; film perseveres. Yet artificial intelligence has raised a kindred specter: that humans may go obsolete long before their artistic mediums do. Novels scribed by GPT-3; art conjured by DALL·E—machines could be making art long after people are gone. Actors are not exempt. As deepfakes evolve, fears are mounting that future films, TV shows, and commercials may not need them at all.

Not even Bruce Willis. Last month the actor had the strange experience of “appearing” in an ad where he was tied to a bomb on the back of a yacht, growling "Mississippi" in a Russian accent. The Telegraph reported the deepfake was possible because he sold his performance rights. That wasn't quite true—a representative for Willis later told reporters the actor had done no such thing. And as my colleague Steven Levy wrote a few days ago, the company who made the ad—the cheekily named Deepcake—never claimed to hold Willis' future rights, but had struck a deal that allowed the company to map a digital version of his appearance onto another actor in a commercial for the Russian cell network Megafon.

Yet the question of “who owns Bruce Willis,” as Levy put it, isn’t only a concern for the Hollywood star and his representatives. It concerns actors unions across the world, fighting against contracts that exploit their members' naivety about AI. And, for some experts, it's a question that implicates everyone, portending a wilder, dystopian future—one in which identities are bought, sold, and seized.

In America, explains Jennifer Rothman, author of The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, people have a right under various state laws to limit unauthorized appropriation of their identities, particularly their names and likenesses. The scope of protection varies state by state. Some have statutes protecting the “right of publicity” (a law barring unauthorized use of a person’s name, likeness, voice, or other indicia of identity without permission, usually for a commercial purpose), while others offer these safeguards through common, or judge-made, laws. A few have both statutory and common law protections.

The devil is in the details, though. "A private individual or company that simply creates a deepfake of a person, without more, does not obviously run afoul of the right of publicity," explains David A. Simon, a research fellow at Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School. In other words, if a Willis deepfake appears in an American ad for potato chips, then a claim becomes viable; if someone deepfakes Willis’ yippie-ki-yay swagger into a home movie and throws it on YouTube, the actor may not have much of a case. Under certain circumstances, deepfake makers are protected by the First Amendment. As one Northwestern University paper put it last year, “the government cannot prohibit speech merely because the speech is false; there must be some additional problem,” like defamation.

“The right of publicity requires the commercial appropriation of identity while tort law does not always require a commercial element,” explains Simon. “If an actor's deepfake is manipulated to portray someone in a defamatory manner, or used to defame someone else, the actor may have the ability to sue in tort."

Actors unions have been fretting over deepfakes for decades. The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)’s interest began with sports video games, which started generating their own image rights controversies back in 2013. Even just looking at the rudimentary and blocky depictions of athletes in video games it was clear that the tech would develop in a way that would make it possible to drop actors into movies as easily as developers could drop quarterbacks into Madden.

In a landscape of desperate actors, confusing contracts, and multivarious laws, it doesn't take an agile mind to grasp that SAG-AFTRA has its work cut out. The wrong consent given to the wrong company can lead to pretty much any nightmare the mind can weave. Remember that episode of Friends where Joey ended up in an STD advert after a spot of seemingly innocuous modeling? It’s like that, except, in some cases, Joey wouldn't have to model at all. In his (fictional) story, everything was fine at the end of the half-hour, but a different (real) actor could find it hard to get work after being deepfaked into an unflattering or controversial role. And it’s no longer just a problem of visual depiction: Deepfakes allow an actor to be “used,” in Simon’s words, with words quite literally put into their mouths. (TikTok had to settle a legal case recently around this very issue.)

“This is relevant not just to AI contracts [for synthetic performances], but any contract involving rights to one’s likeness and voice,” says Danielle S. Van Lier, assistant general counsel, intellectual property and contracts at SAG-AFTRA. “We have been seeing contracts that now include ‘simulation rights’ to performers’ images, voices, and performances. These contract terms are buried deep in the boilerplate of performance agreements in traditional media.”

Yet, and here’s the rub, actors also see the rise of deepfakes as a chance to cash in. “While many never become ‘famous,’ their names, voices, images or likenesses still attain commercial value,” explains Van Lier. The commercial opportunities of synthetic performances–an actor’s voice used in an automated audiobook or appearance as a digital avatar, abound, hence why SAG-AFTRA is pushing away from the term deepfakes–and its association with porn–to terms like “digital double” or “AI-generated.”

This is where the importance of “transferability” of publicity rights comes in: A law passed in New York in 2020, for instance, allows postmortem rights to be transferred. “The ability to license and convey this property interest provides an important source of revenue to these professionals and their families,” says Van Lier. “Licensing allows creative professionals to work with entities and individuals with technological, financial and legal expertise, and to maximize the value of the asset.”

It’s crucial to understand here that transferability isn’t about authorizing uses of your identity for money; it’s about ownership, your identity conceived of as a transferable property right, like patents or copyrights, able to be bought and sold. “It affects whether the right over a person's identity is transferred (and taken away) from them and owned by a third party,” says Rothman.

For some experts, this transferability could lead to people losing control of their “personality” as firms take full ownership of their identity rather than just a licensed use for a particular purpose. In fact, the original calls for these kinds of transferability were made in the 1950s by studio lawyers who wanted to control the movies that actors appeared in and the products they endorsed. “One might (potentially) garner more money for such a total transfer, but the cost seems inconceivably great to the person and society,” Rothman says.

Student athletes, for instance, risk agents, managers, companies, or even the NCAA hoovering up their identities in the hope of extracting any future profit if they find big-league success. Actors, athletes, and average citizens, Rothman argues, are in danger of losing control of their "own names, likenesses, and voices to creditors, ex-spouses, record producers, managers, and even Facebook."

Many actors won’t be affected, simply because their identities won’t be valuable. But it is also true that celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Tom Cruise have bargaining power that others don’t: They can bullishly negotiate that the use of their image not extend beyond any particular show or film. Smaller actors, meanwhile, face the possibility of contracts that extract rights wholesale. "There is a real risk that new actors (i.e., just starting out and desperate for breakthrough work) would be especially vulnerable to signing away their publicity rights as a condition of their first contracts," says Johanna Gibson, a professor of intellectual property law at Queen Mary, University of London. "This power imbalance could be exploited by studios keen both to commercialize image and character and indeed to avoid libel (depending upon the nature of that commercialization), as the performer would no longer have rights to control how their image is used."

This could leave actors in a position of either missing out on work, or signing a contract that would later allow them to be deepfaked into content they find demeaning without legal recourse. In the film franchise model, Gibson argues, the risk is even greater.

SAG-AFTRA disagrees, explaining that reasonable minds will always differ, even when working toward the same stated goal. “While some prominent commentators have expressed fear that a transferable right of publicity could lead to involuntary transfers or forced commercialization, there is little basis to believe this fear would come to fruition,” says Van Lier. ”There are no instances, to our knowledge, of the right being involuntarily transferred during anyone’s lifetime or anyone being forced to exploit it. The most notable attempt involved OJ Simpson and the court expressly refused to transfer it to his victim’s family.”

Eventually, AIs trained on Bruce Willis’ likeness won't need Bruce Willis at all. “If a company can train its AI algorithms to replicate the specific mannerisms, timing, tonality, etc. of a particular actor, it makes the AI-generated content more and more life-like,” says Van Lier. “This can have long-term implications.” In other words, actors—and everyone else—must learn how to protect their digital rights, or they could find themselves performing a role they did not expect.