You can't take an AI to lunch - but maybe you should try

Quotes and experts are an essential and human part of news journalism. Yet the pressures of production are stretching efforts to confirm who they are - and with that comes risk.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 14:54, 10 April 2025

One particular media interface that is both a continuous source of friction and of enlightenment is around the use of experts to add depth and understanding to the subject being reported on.

A good expert can inform the reporter and reader, and can make, break, or elevate a story with their insight or expertise. This power of course comes from everyone agreeing that: A) the expert is an actual expert on the subject, and perhaps even more fundamentally, B) the expert is who they say they are.

It is the goal of the writer to ensure neither A or B come into question. Having been on both ends of news desk pressure to find experts, and to verify them and their credentials - often by calls, record checks, and meetings in person - I would feel affronted by the very idea that either A or B could come into dispute. For A and B to be in dispute would be unthinkable! 

So how could such a thing come about today?

The pressure that I once knew as a newsroom journalist has undoubtedly increased in this era, even as the relative remuneration has fallen. Let's not make any bones about it, that pressure is one largely of volume, the sheer quantity of stories required to fill the ever-chomping maw of the news monster being greater than at any previous time.

Businesses which connect journalists with experts for the purposes of sourcing a quote within a subject or field have become very much a thing in this accelerated epoch, even if they existed in embryo during my reporting career.

Regardless of their respective methods for establishing bona fides, one can quickly see that introducing another party to the traditionally two-party relationship of journalist and expert is also introducing another place where a crack in veracity might grow.

And so it might well be, according to a snowballing investigation published this week by news industry title/watchdog Press Gazette, which dug tenaciously into some of the sources featured in a number of UK media stories and revealed, well, a frustrating journey of trying to learn more about them, or even if they exist at all.

It's a good read, and already prompting much reaction from all sides, complete with (so far empty) threats of legal action.

The real bargain of trust

Having said that these services could introduce a potential new point of weakness in the journalist-expert chain, I would suggest that a journalist using such a service is, by doing so, putting at risk the value of trust placed in them by their audience. Off-loading all work to check out sources is simply sub-contracting that trust, if you like. 

This may be fine if the intermediary is trusted beyond all doubt, yet even in such a case, we would all probably agree that a serious complaint about content hinged on a contested quote from a sub-contracted expert would make the audit trail, if not a legal one, much more complex to unpick.

Given the difficulties illustrated by Press Gazette in ascertaining the existence of certain "experts", and a somewhat amusing over-indexing of one associated with a sex toy retailer, you can be faced with a situation where even their actual corporeal reality is uncertain, never mind their academic or professional credentials.

Looking ahead, where such a verification quicksand exists, you can see it's one into which the swirling cauldron of purest aggregated Gen-AI blandness could merrily pour its content.

We already face the issue of audiences finding questionable AI-generated news becoming harder to tell apart from the real stuff, and it would be a new problem for our industry if the signal went up to future would-be unscrupulous operators that there could be room for AI chicanery to target the news business itself.

It is upon all of us to maintain vigilance against its appearance. 

Quotes on demand the old way

Finding experts is difficult and time consuming, and can lead to dead ends, and I speak from experience. However, the times I struck gold in finding the right person to talk about the right thing for a story remain memorable. The reward to effort ratio was worth it. 

Yet, as mentioned above, the sheer volume of content many news journalists are now expected to produce means such university department phonebook ransacking efforts as I once made are now an impossible time sink for many. Having said that, some things certainly do not change, and so we come to the reason the phrase "rent-a-quote" exists in the lexicon of UK journalism.

We'll give you the Oxford Reference definition of rent-a-quote, because it's wonderfully accurate:

"A mildly derogatory phrase used by journalists among themselves to describe somebody in public life who can be relied upon to provide a quotable comment if contacted about virtually any story. Politicians, lawyers, authors, religious figures, and self-styled 'community leaders' are particularly likely to fall into this category. Although journalists tend to belittle those seen as rent-a-quotes, they usually keep their phone numbers just in case."

One particular academic in the field of organisational psychology springs to mind in the context of rent-a-quotes, who at one point not so many years ago, wandered across the UK's media landscape dispensing opinions in the manner of a substantially upgraded confetti cannon. 

It reached such a point that his quotes followed me across the border from a job in England to one in Scotland. Such was the quantity of his quotage, it was entirely possible to believe there was more than one of him.

He shouldn't take the majority of the blame. The gentleman in question, being of an affable transatlantic nature, was rather the victim of hungry British news hacks who realised that, such was the generality of the academic field in which he studied, he could be called upon to opine on nearly anything. 

His only real error was doing it with such industry. I can recall removing one his quotes from a story I was editing, and it didn't do my opinion of the story any good, which felt like spoiled goods thereafter.

I see he is still thriving, though less quoted these days.

As much as unverified quotes are clearly an issue in some cases, it's important to bear in mind that we can read pages and pages of real news articles that feature no quotes at all, false or not. 

There are a few cases where this is acceptable, such as in the immediate aftermath of an event, or certain types of specialist reporting, yet actual quotes from actual people remain an essential ingredient of true news reporting, and require effort to obtain. That's why some people might actually be tempted to help make them up. 

For our industry, well used to caution over blind trust, it is no great new skill to start doing the legwork on verification ourselves once more, or demand a system that would defeat those which would try and exploit it. The answer of course will probably be to let AI battle AI, and a whole lotta video calls, or all of the above.

Personally, I vote for the return of good old-fashioned lunches with contacts. 

We all know AI is eating our lunch, so nothing will flush out a fake faster than the suggestion that they pay for a real one. And when your expert turns out to be real, I am certain your expenses departments will wave the bills through as acceptable investments in trust and reputation.

But don't quote me on that.