Reputation risks posed by AI loom for companies as election year heats up, expert warns

Companies need to be vigilant about reputational risks posed by bad actors using artificial intelligence (AI) as the U.S. enters a contentious election year and corporations seen as stepping into the fray become caught in a quagmire, one expert warns.

“I think you’ve seen some bad actors in this space, especially more on the political end of things,” Matt Gorman, vice president at Targeted Victory, a Stagwell company, told FOX Business at CES 2024. “You can make a video using AI that gets reporters saying what you want them to say, and it can go around the world twice before people have a chance to respond.” 

“We’ve seen companies come under a microscope if they inject themselves in the political arena, they become political actors. And that is a very hard trajectory to turn around. Ask any company that’s been in this thicket in the last four or five years, from Disney to Bud Light,” he added.

“AI can spin a false narrative, can spin a false premise and yet it’s extremely hard to respond to,” Gorman explained. “Companies need to at least have a mechanism to be able to respond as fast and quickly as possible… responding and finding these things can be like turning around a massive ship when with something like this that can affect your brand, it can hurt a stock price, and can hurt your reputation seemingly overnight, you need to be on guard and you need to be able to react quickly.”

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Gorman said that corporations should outline a general plan to respond to issues that may arise and pose a reputational risk ahead of time that provides broad awareness among decision-makers even though it’s not practical to have a comprehensive plan for every possible crisis.

“I think you need to sit down as a company and, being informed by your company values, look at what a plan would look like. It doesn’t need to be extremely down to the minute letter detail, but if a crisis happens you want to be able to say you’re 30% of the way there, 40% of the way there,” Gorman explained. 

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Businesses need to be proactive about having a general plan of action in place for reputational crises that may arise, Gorman said. (iStock / iStock)

“You don’t need to be 100 because it’ll never be, you know, plug and play 100%. But you want to be able have an awareness of these issues, have talked about this as a senior team so that way everyone is on the same page and has at least a verbal and spatial awareness of these sorts of things,” he added. 

“We’ve talked about this before, we’ve all agreed on a broad strategy, and then you can tailor the tactics based on the facts on the ground. But everyone kind of knows the broad strategy and the objectives and the goals that you’re trying to work with once a crisis gets into place.”

Gorman said that businesses should be aware that political activists within the company and on the outside may look to leverage that brand for their ideological aims. As a result, companies “need to think long and hard, knowing their customer, knowing their values, about whether or not to engage in some sort of political debate is actually advantageous to them and is true to who they are.”

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Bad actors can use AI to clone voices using just a few seconds of audio and generate language the real speaker never used. ((Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images) / Getty Images)

Targeted Victory is known for advising Republican campaigns as well as corporate clients, and Gorman noted that companies viewed as being true to their values on whichever side of the spectrum they stand on will be better able to weather criticism and maintain a broad appeal.

“It’s one thing to pick a side, it’s another thing to pick and choose and when people cannot really truly understand what side of the spectrum you’re on, what your true values are,” he explained. “Some of the highest reputations for brands are Chick-fil-A and Patagonia. What do conservatives love wearing? Patagonia vests and gear. What’s the most popular lunchtime restaurant in Midtown Manhattan? It’s Chick-fil-A at 34th Street.”

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“So you have people willing to cross the political divide for products they value if they know you’re coming from an authentic place. But if you picking and choosing, and you start flip-flopping, that is when you get into trouble,” Gorman said.