Press Gazette today names more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press in recent years and featured more than 1,000 times in newspapers, magazines and online titles.
Our PR Hall of Shame is a live document highlighting brands and spokespeople who should be treated with a high degree of caution by journalists.
For this list we have focused strictly on cases where the ‘expert’ does not appear to exist , rather than the many other cases where the expert does not have the knowledge they claim.
We are now appealing to journalists and PR professionals to notify us whenever they encounter brands depoying fake experts to help us to warn others and curb the threat of fake AI-enhanced ‘experts’ which threatens both the credibility of the press, and the trust between journalists and PRs.
If you have been approached by people touting experts who seem not to exist, please get in touch via [email protected] – we will check your story out and add to the database.
And if you represent a brand or expert who you believe unfairly appears on the below, please get in touch. Press Gazette has attemped to get in touch with all the brands listed below.
Journalists flooded with AI-generated PR content
Journalists have reported being bombarded with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dubious press releases a week, with the organisations behind them never replying to follow-ups and moving to different email addresses to avoid being blocked.
Owners of press response services have complained that they are targeted by dozens of AI-generated profiles and ‘fake people’, attempting to fool British journalists.
So why are organisations doing this? It’s done in the name of search-engine optimisation (SEO), with links from high-quality sites such as newspapers hugely valuable in boosting the rankings of commercial sites ranging from sex toy shops to trade-finder websites .
British businesses such as Plumbworld, Ski Vertigo, Edit Suits and others appear to have employed unscrupulous SEO organisations which use these tactics for short-term gain.
Many of these ‘experts’ have AI-generated images and copy which bears the hallmarks of AI (coming up as mostly or fully AI-generated in analysis by Pangram), meaning that featuring these ‘experts’ pollutes the media with low-quality and misleading AI slop.
In the coming days, Press Gazette will reveal more fake case studies, and more ‘borderline’ cases where non-experts assume expertise they do not have, courtesy of research conducted with NeoMam Studios into experts featured in British media in recent years.
Some of the operations to deceive British media have been extremely long-lasting and large-scale: one psychiatrist, Barbara Santini, who works for sex toy site Peaches and Screams, and does not exist, appeared in the British media dozens of times .
Three related companies, MyJobQuote, PriceYourJob and HomeHow featured more than 20 fake experts on everything from interior design to gardening who proved extremely elusive online, with no LinkedIn profiles, social media – or, crucially, a way to book their services. Press Gazette has published a dossier of more than 500 stories appearing in major newsbrands based on press releases sent out from MyJobQuote featuring fake and misleading comment (many, but by no means all, of which have been deleted by the publishers concerned).
Three linked agencies – SignalTheNews, RelayTheUpdate and InformTheAudience – have bombarded UK media with doubtful case studies . One SignalTheNews PR campaign widely featured in the UK national and regional press told the story of lottery winners who had lost winning tickets (and who do not appear to exist ).
All three agencies have exactly the same website design, and link to Romanian companies, and appear to be unfinished.
Press response service Pressflow co-founder Jelena Skene said challenges around dubious, likely AI-generated, experts have become more severe in recent months.
In one “surge” of applicants to use her service, the organisation had to reject 25 out of 37 due to concerns over their authenticity.
One such applicant was Kirsty Thomas, a nutritionist from Prowise Healthcare, who has a LinkedIn profile but no picture or employment history and a seemingly AI-generated image on the Prowise website.
The image, which sees Thomas standing at a table behind what appears to be a three-foot banana, was assessed as 99% probably AI-generated by AI detector Pangram.
Skene told Press Gazette: “We started the platform at the tail end of 2024, and didn’t notice much AI usage until about Q2 2025 when it became more prolific.
“We’ve had to work pretty hard to work around this. We’ve since set up some tech in the back end that monitors and flags anything that seems to be automated, AI-written or irrelevant to the request, which means that we can now immediately pick these up and deactivate accounts.
“The worst offender came on the 6th of October, when a colleague shared a link to our platform on X. It drove 37 new sign-ups in a matter of a couple of hours, following which I had to ask her to take it down.
“We have extremely strict rules on pitching to journalists and following the new sign-ups, we’ve started seeing a flurry of AI slop start to come through in minutes.”
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