28 August 2025

AI – making it up as it goes along


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communications and Media Advisor


‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ is the title of a dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K Dick published in 1967. Fast forward to 2025 and we discover that Ai Chatbots are prone to bouts of ‘hallucination’. IBM says Ai hallucinations are when a chatbot perceives patterns or objects that are non-existent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, published research, in February of this year, into Ai Hallucinations. It found that AI Chatbots introduced “significant inaccuracies” when summarizing news content. Something we at FIRST Advisers encountered during the recent July and August reporting season.

Ai hallucination to real world misinformation

It was quite a surprise when our media monitoring revealed a Tipranks story about how a client was facing ‘significant risk’ and ‘compliance challenges,’ when there was no increased risk or compliance burden. Days later it was just as surprising to be informed by AInvest that a completely unrelated 3rd party, was offering a completely unrelated cash flow management solution to its customers that was somehow driving the same client’s share price higher. It was jolly nice of them to do so but, alas, this story was also complete nonsense.

Both Tipranks and AInvest are Ai enabled retail investor platforms. Both offer limited access to free content as a lure to get retail investors to pay a subscription for greater levels of access. And both platforms carried Ai generated stories that were at best misinterpreting our clients ASX filings and at worst conflating completely unrelated stories to generate a fundamentally misleading article.

If you are prepared to work for it, you can find a disclaimer at the bottom of the AInvest webpages that admits – “The news articles available on this platform are generated in whole or in part by artificial intelligence and may not have been reviewed or fact checked by human editors.”. While Tipranks’ Ai content has a Tipranks Auto-Generated News Desk byline and again, if you are prepared to work for it, you can click on the byline and get to an About page which it claims Tipranks uses AI to scan company announcements, translating complex ideas into easily understandable articles.

Keep a human hand on the tiller

There is a sense of inevitability about the adoption of Ai to accelerate and streamline content generation. But as long as chatbots are prone to ‘dream of electric sheep’ there is also a sense of inevitability around inaccurate, misleading and potential harmful Ai fabrications being peddled as news. Research by NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, found at least 49 ‘news’ websites that are “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software”.

In our increasingly automated world, there may be little that can be done to correct erroneous Ai stories. Thankfully they are occurring, for now and for the most part, at the very periphery of online ‘news’. The best course of action will likely be to make sure to have effective media monitoring in place, that is curated by humans, to avoid surprises and set the record straight in the event an Ai hallucination prompts misinformed questions.


28 May 2025

Cyber security gets stuffed!


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communication and Media Advisor. The recent ‘credential stuffing’ cyber attack on Australia’s super funds sector once again highlights the growing cyber threat to business. ‘Credential stuffing’ is when usernames and passwords sourced from hacks on lower value websites or the dark web are used to gain access to higher value targets such […]

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26 June 2024

What to do if you suffer a cyber security data breach


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communication and Media Advisor It feels more like ‘when’ and not ‘if’ companies will face data breaches. In the last week, reports are emerging of a hacker trying to sell data from 30 million Ticketek customers following the announcement of a data breach by Ticketek on 31 May 2024.  With the growing […]

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29 February 2024

Managing Cyber security risks


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communication and Media Advisor Cybersecurity is back at the top of the news agenda. The Albanese Government is seeking to tackle ‘Doxing’, which is publicly revealing identifying material about someone without their consent; the AFP has helped to smash global ransomware gang Lockbit and the hacker claimed to behind the massive Medibank […]

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28 February 2023

CEOs need to drive social change to build trust


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communications and Media The findings of 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer were revealed at Davos in January, with the Australian cut of the data made public at the start of February. The Edelman global survey highlights concern around “severe polarisation” among respondents, which the PR firm interprets as people believing their society is […]

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12 December 2022

Travelling at the speed of change, 2022 in review


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communications and Media US founding father, Benjamin Franklin, said “nothing is certain except death and taxes”. Had he been in a more expansive mood he may have included ‘change’ as another certainty. 2022 has been a year of change. We welcomed Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee and mourned her passing. We celebrated the […]

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30 August 2022

Accessing new media opportunities


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communications and Media Adviser It is well understood that the media industry has been experiencing significant technological disruption with the emergence of digital, online and social media platforms. The recent 2022 Digital News Report, by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, indicates the various shocks of the last few years, […]

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28 February 2022

Distrust threatens societal stability


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communications and Media Adviser One of the findings from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer survey is a cycle of distrust that is threatening societal stability both here in Australia and globally. The survey results were published on February 16th, a little over a week before Russia invaded the Ukraine. Australia trapped in […]

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4 March 2021

Locking in the Trust premium


GILES RAFFERTY, Corporate Communication and Media Advisor Trust in Australian Institutions has surged during the Coronavirus pandemic to reach all-time highs.  This resurgence of trust means, in Australia,  the institutions of Business, Government, Media and NGO’s are all now viewed as competent where just 12 months ago only Business was seen to be so. Two institutions, […]

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6 November 2017

Communicating in a Crisis


Geoff Michels, Senior Corporate Communications Adviser A crisis is an event or a series of events that adversely affects the health or well-being of employees, the environment, a community or the wider public, the integrity of a product or the reputation of an organisation.  A crisis can be operational (fire, an accident) or non-operational (workplace discrimination, […]

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10 April 2017

Presentation Techniques for Senior Executives


Geoff Michels, Senior Adviser – Corporate Communications At FIRST Advisers we are frequently asked to coach senior business executives or managers on presentation techniques.  Generally it’s about coming across well at an AGM, or at a roadshow event or in presenting to audiences large and small.  There is also a significant demand for advice and […]

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5 July 2016

Short Attacks: The new wolf pack


VICTORIA GEDDES, ECECUTIVE DIRECTOR Those who have been on the receiving end of a short attack describe the process as akin to being at war, or being pursued by a pack of wolves, with the company’s very destruction their opponent’s goal. A short or bear attack, to make the distinction clear, is not the same […]

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12 November 2015

Why someone on the outside should draft that press release


FIRST Advisers Corporate Communications Some see it as axiomatic that the people within a company are best placed to draft a press release or other piece of external communication. After all, who better to write the news than those on the inside: the people who were responsible for it, were there from the beginning and […]

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