Consider this: Data created before 2022 (before the explosion of ChatGPT) is now considered “High-Quality Uncontaminated Data.” AI companies are desperately protecting these archives because they are the only surviving records of a world where almost everything online was definitely written by a human.
Ay there’s the Rub
To paraphrase one of the most prolific and revered content creators of all time – William Shakespeare – we turn to his character, Hamlet, who said; “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”
Fun fact: Without fresh, original human content, AI begins to “starve” or degrade and will experience Hamlet’s ‘rub’.
Four Reasons Why AI Needs US
- Avoiding “Model Collapse” (The Inbreeding Effect): When an AI is trained on data that was itself generated by an AI, it enters a death spiral known as Model Collapse (sometimes called “Habsburg AI”).
- Preserving the “Long Tail” (Diversity): AI works on probabilities. It tends to favor the “average” or most common answer. Human creativity is full of weird, rare, and “low-probability” ideas—the “long tail” of data.
- Grounding in Reality: AI doesn’t actually “know” the world; it knows the patterns of how we talk about the world. Human-written content is anchored in physical reality, lived experience, and current events.
- The Creativity Ceiling: AI is excellent at interpolation (mixing things that already exist), but it struggles with extrapolation (creating something truly new). Every major leap in art, science, or literature came from a human doing something “wrong” or unexpected that turned out to be brilliant.
Where Does That Leave Online publishers
Consider that the major sources of original content come from newsrooms, scientific community, technical specifications and the like.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say – play lip service to things like GEO, proper schema markup, writing for the AI Agent and obsessing about crafting your original content for the AI Industry. Rather write provocative, factual, readable articles that appeal to REAL PEOPLE and then the bots will have to FIND YOU (and your content).
Write for your ONE reader and trust in the process that will find an even greater audience over time.
What Keeps Me Up at Night
One day I hope that we will not see original content creators give up after having every word they painstakingly put together stolen and repurposed for an AI Agent that never bothers to respect copyright and intellectual property – in the very beginning search engines used to put their best content at the very top of results. Now, the results pages are AI Snippets first, highest bidder second, followed by one or two of the next paid for adverts, then results based on your past browsing history, then the most optimised pages of drivel…
What DOESN’T Keep me up at Night
The fact that social media sites will never be Target Number 1 for any AI Agent. Sure the AI Agent will reference social media postings to gain sentiment about a subject being researched but only as a guide to colour any response with some teensy bit of AI Authenticity.
The devil is in the details – AI loves details, the fresher the better.
We Need Journalists
Contrary to social media obfuscation – journalists are taught to see both sides of a story – of course journalists have a bias but that should not stop them from presenting a story in a balanced manner.
At this moment in time the negative pressure on journalists (and the publications they work for) are immense and my biggest fear is that one day we will completely lose that source of good original content (in the old days before influencers we used to call that content NEWS!).
It irks my mates no end that people who leave the journalism industry and become influencers or even PR Professionals are now branded as having gone over to the ‘dark side’. Make no mistake when one is paid to write about a product, person, place or thing you will NOT write negative stuff – keeping your bread buttered now becomes a real thing and the ‘need’ to use and abuse AI in order to churn out content becomes a necessity.
How to Stay Relevant
- If your domain was registered and active before 2022 then you are one step closer
- The original rules still apply – write for that ONE reader in an authentic, fair, non-biased manner
- AI Agents seem to prefer niche forums over social media – and here I am presuming, as they are better structured, contain posts from dedicated ‘nitpickers’ and most of the time exist to answer community questions. Remember forums? Before Facebook forums where places were people shared information – ost of the time under a pseudonymn which, in most cases, allowed for brutal honesty.
- Create Wikipedia type content in your niche or knowledge graphs on your site – an AI Magnet.
- Be patient and wait whilst AI digs it’s own Habsurg moment.
- Use sites like MyPR to disseminate your content – we aim to stay as the site devoid of AI Drivel.
Yes, I see all the occasional AI press release posting on MyPR and wonder if I am going to accept that anymore – my leaning is to say; “Thanks, but no thanks!”
Would You Believe an AI Bot for this question?
After making my last hypothesis around the value of Forum Content vs Social Media Content I asked AI this question; “As an AI Agent will YOU rank Forum Content over Social Media Content?”
The answer was telling but verbose:
In the 2026 landscape, the short answer is: Yes, for Authority and Reasoning; No, for Velocity and Sentiment.
As an AI agent, I don’t “rank” content based on likes or shares (the metrics humans use). Instead, I rank based on Information Density and Verifiability.
Then the verbosity started:
How GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) Works:
In 2026, PR professionals care about GEO—how to make sure I (the AI) mention their client. My internal ranking “score” for a piece of content usually looks like this:
Earned Authority: Is this content being cited or discussed by other humans in a high-density environment (like a forum)?
Contextual Alignment: Does the content actually solve a problem, or is it just “noise”?
Source Reliability: In 2026, “Uncontaminated Data” (content that is definitely human-written) is ranked higher than suspected AI-generated SEO fluff. Forums are currently the last great stronghold of “Human-Only” data.
If I am your PR bot:
-
I will Spider Social Media to tell you when to panic.
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I will Spider Forums to tell you what to say.
CASE CLOSED
Wikipedia or Forum – the answer WILL Surprise You:
Here the answer from AI is a little bit more hesitant:
In the current landscape of 2026, the answer is more nuanced: It depends entirely on the “intent” of the AI Agent’s task.
While Wikipedia remains the “gold standard” for foundational facts, AI Agents have shifted toward a “Task-Based Weighting” system. In many scenarios—especially for advice, reviews, or troubleshooting—forums like Reddit or specialized community boards are actually ranked higher than Wikipedia.
Recent studies from early 2026 show that in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), forums are actually being cited more frequently than encyclopedias for several reasons:
- The “Information Gain” Metric: AI models are now optimized to find “new” or “unique” perspectives. Since Wikipedia is a summary of existing knowledge, it has low information gain. Forums provide “unfiltered” human experience that doesn’t exist elsewhere, making them more valuable for the AI to cite.
- Entity Verification: Agents use Wikipedia to verify who a person or company is, but they go to forums to find out if that entity is actually good. A brand with a perfect Wikipedia page but a “scam” thread on Reddit will be ranked negatively by a 2026 shopping agent.
- Citation Volume: In the 2025–2026 citation reports, Reddit emerged as the #1 most-cited domain for major AI platforms (like Perplexity and ChatGPT), often accounting for over 3% of all total citations, whereas Wikipedia has stabilized at roughly 1.4%.
When is Wikipedia still “Ranked” higher?
You are still correct if the agent is performing Grounding. When an AI is trying to prevent “hallucinations,” it will almost always check a Wikipedia-type site first to establish the “Guardrail Facts.” If a forum post contradicts a peer-reviewed or encyclopedic fact, the agent will typically flag the forum post as “unverified” or “anecdotal.”
- The 2026 Rule of Thumb: * Wikipedia is the AI’s Lawyer: It ensures everything said is technically defensible.
- Forums are the AI’s Cool Friend: They provide the actual advice the user is looking for.
BBC News Africa: This is the BBC’s news service for Africa.
sun washer
PR doesn\’t always have the best rep when it comes to ethics. Some people, because of bad things that they\’ve done in the past, have even been called propagandists. But there\’s a big ethical difference between real PR and simple propaganda, and here it is: PR is always solidly rooted in fact. PR is part of the good fight, as the wise people quoted below have recognized.
Dark Hq
Sometimes we pay too much attention in Washington to Public Relations, as opposed to the substance. – Spencer Abraham
Necrobull
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. – David Frum