The Margaux Blanchard Incident

“Margaux Blanchard” sends chills down my spine.

It’s not a pleas­ant exper­i­ence to write this art­icle as a PR pro­fes­sion­al. I try to embody a pos­it­ive out­look on the future of journ­al­ism and pub­lic rela­tions, but with the Margaux Blanchard incid­ent as a back­drop, it gets painful.

So, let’s begin with Margaux Blanchard herself.

Here we go:

The AI Journalist Who Never Existed

Margaux Blanchard was an AI agent. Think of an AI agent as a large lan­guage mod­el (such as ChatGPT) with access to extern­al ser­vices, such as email accounts and web browsing.

Unlike a typ­ic­al AI chat ses­sion, where the AI is doing work while you’re act­ively engaged in a con­ver­sa­tion, an AI agent will use third-party ser­vices and keep per­form­ing its tasks accord­ing to a schedule.

So, you can tell an AI agent to comb through the inter­net in search of poten­tial news stor­ies, then have it rewrite those stor­ies and pitch them via email to busy news­rooms. If you want, you can ask the AI agent to pose as a real freel­ance journ­al­ist pitch­ing a real story.

Not only is there a chance that a news­room will pick up such a story, but they might even pay the AI agent a freel­ance fee for it.

Enter Margaux Blanchard, the AI agent who suc­cess­fully pitched sev­er­al news art­icles to well-respec­ted news out­lets. “She” was then found out and exposed by Dispatch, and most of Blanchard’s stor­ies were sub­sequently removed from vari­ous web­sites in the after­math. ¹Furedi, J. (2025, August 26). Margaux Blanchard, the journ­al­ist who didn’t exist. Dispatch. https://​dis​patch​-media​.com/​m​a​r​g​a​u​x​-​b​l​a​n​c​h​a​r​d​-​t​h​e​-​j​o​u​r​n​a​l​i​s​t​-​w​h​o​-​d​i​d​n​t​-​e​x​i​st/ ²Hern, A., & Milmo, D. (2025, August 21). AI author’s art­icles removed by Wired and Business Insider after fab­ric­a­tion con­cerns. The Guardian. … Continue read­ing

A PR Pitch Good Enough to Work

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al myself, I felt my heart sink when I read the story. As an industry, we already face chal­lenges with journ­al­ists being bom­barded with sub­par PR pitches. But this?

Margaux Blanchard’s pitch to Dispatch was actu­ally quite good. The pro­posed story was a good match for the outlet’s edit­or­i­al vis­ion. And the writ­ing seemed sol­id and inspired enough, at least from what I could see.

The prob­lem, of course, was that the story was false.

Now, by “false” I mean that the pitched story was entirely fab­ric­ated from start to fin­ish. Dispatch did some dig­ging and was soon able to debunk not just the story, but also the promp­ted per­sona of “Margaux Blanchard.”

Through some journ­al­ist­ic due dili­gence, Dispatch were able to dodge a bul­let. But the same could not be said for oth­er cred­ible news out­lets that ran with vari­ous stor­ies writ­ten by Blanchard.

The Industrial-Scale Turing Test

So, what’s the main PR takeaway of the Margaux Blanchard incident?

Newsrooms are typ­ic­ally under immense pres­sure. Competitive dead­lines, 24-hour news cycles, con­tent-hungry chan­nels, under­paid staffers, and crum­bling busi­ness mod­els. It’s a mess, for sure. However, this is noth­ing new.

When it comes to mass-pitch­ing AI agents, PR pro­fes­sion­als can’t really juggle a pebble around without break­ing wafer-thin glass walls. We’ve been inund­at­ing journ­al­ists with sub­par pitches for a cen­tury. But is this some­thing new to con­sider? Sadly, it isn’t.

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al, it’s the Turing aspect of the Margaux Blanchard story that scares the liv­ing day­lights out of me.

Hear me out. Forget about Margaux Blanchard and think of all the thou­sands (or mil­lions?) of unex­posed AI agents pitch­ing stor­ies as we speak. Whether they’re lying or not when pitch­ing, these bots are appar­ently passing the Turing test at an indus­tri­al scale. ³Peña-Alonso, U., Peña-Fernández, S., & Meso-Ayerdi, K. (2025). Journalists’ per­cep­tions of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and dis­in­form­a­tion risks. arXiv. https://​arx​iv​.org/​a​b​s​/​2​5​0​9​.​0​1​824

In short, giv­en the right cir­cum­stances, these AI agents can pass as humans.

When AI Stops Lying

At machine scale, per­sua­sion becomes infrastructure.

Obviously, it’s not good if we have thou­sands of AI agents run­ning around pos­ing as humans ped­dling fake news stor­ies. Obviously, it’s not good if edit­ors and journ­al­ists fall prey to such auto­mated pitch attempts. ⁴Werdmuller, B. (2025, December 17). Nieman Lab’s pre­dic­tions for journ­al­ism 2026. Nieman Lab. https://​werd​.io/​n​i​e​m​a​n​-​l​a​b​s​-​p​r​e​d​i​c​t​i​o​n​s​-​f​o​r​-​j​o​u​r​n​a​l​i​s​m​-​2​0​26/

Lying PR bots are bad, obviously.

But to journ­al­is­m’s cred­it, Dispatch caught Margaux Blanchard red-handed after blatantly lying.

But pon­der what hap­pens when AI agent pro­viders fix this deceit­ful AI beha­viour with some clev­er pro­gram­ming. Now we have armies of AI agents that can­not lie. The only way for such AI agents to suc­ceed is to find, devel­op, and dis­sem­in­ate true stor­ies. ⁵Nieman Lab. (2025, December). In 2026, AI will out­write humans. https://​www​.nieman​lab​.org/​2​0​2​5​/​1​2​/​i​n​-​2​0​2​6​-​a​i​-​w​i​l​l​-​o​u​t​w​r​i​t​e​-​h​u​m​a​ns/ ⁶Ntatzis, P. (2026, January 2). The future of news in 2026: Key takeaways from Nieman Lab. https://​www​.atc​.gr/​f​u​t​u​r​e​-​o​f​-​n​e​w​s​-​2​0​2​6​-​n​i​e​m​a​n​-​l​ab/

What blows my PR mind isn’t that AI lies; it’s that it could poten­tially suc­ceed without lying.

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al, I find myself at a crossroads:

Either I start build­ing armies of “arti­fi­cial spin doc­tors” and find ways to make them under­stand that it’s not okay to lie to get a story pub­lished. Or, I double down on the human aspect of PR. It’s pub­lic rela­tions, after all.

It’s not an obvi­ous choice.

The Temptation of Artificial Spin Doctors

The Turing test is quietly mov­ing from sand­boxes to newsrooms.

I must admit there are com­pel­ling aspects to build­ing an army of spin-doc­tor AI agents. Imagine push­ing a but­ton, and thou­sands of elec­tron­ic “work­er bees” start spin­ning the desired media image of a par­tic­u­lar brand or person.

Obviously, my AI spin doc­tors wouldn’t be allowed to pose as real humans. They must clearly state their ori­gin and pur­pose — just like I do every time I con­tact a journ­al­ist. And just like me, they should nev­er lie when pitch­ing a story. It’s not a mor­al stance; get­ting caught lying will end a PR career.

If noth­ing else, I know quite a few poten­tial cli­ents who would be excited to let me unleash a pack of highly spe­cial­ised AI spin doc­tors on their behalf.

But could it work? The “suc­cess” of Margaux Blanchard and her AI peers can par­tially be attrib­uted to them pos­ing as real humans, as hon­est and hard-work­ing freel­ance journ­al­ists. And how good will such stor­ies be if their AI brains are for­bid­den to spice things up with half-truths and blatant lies?

The Human Moat

The second option is to double down on the rela­tion­ship aspect of pub­lic relations.

It’s pos­sible to ima­gine a future where AI spin doc­tors pitch story ideas to AI journ­al­ists. These pub­lished stor­ies, then, will only be con­sumed by per­son­al AI read­ers com­pil­ing daily digests for indi­vidu­al news con­sumers. We won’t even need web­sites for this future; all we need are data ware­houses with clev­er access management.

I believe the tech sec­tor will do its best to drive us towards this kind of media future. They will steer us this way because they excel in one par­tic­u­lar area — technology.

Unfortunately for tomorrow’s tech­no­crats, humans don’t run well on scripts. For bet­ter or worse, we can bet that we will remain social beings in the fore­see­able future.

And in a world of digit­al inform­a­tion excess, devoid of flesh and bones, authen­t­ic human con­nec­tions will become increas­ingly scarce — because trust doesn’t scale in the same way that inform­a­tion tech­no­logy does.

The inter­net has already been instru­ment­al in sow­ing soci­et­al dis­trust on a glob­al scale. And I can’t prom­ise any­one that it will get any better.

As PR pro­fes­sion­als, how­ever, we can choose to be part of the future that will inev­it­ably remain human. As PR pro­fes­sion­als, how­ever, we can choose to be part of the future that will inev­it­ably remain human.

At least, that’s what I choose to believe — as a human.