‘PR slop’: AI press releases losing trust with journalists
Amrita Sidhu presents at CommsCon (Mumbrella)
Press releases written using artificial intelligence are being dismissed by journalists as lazy, poorly researched and ultimately untrustworthy, according to Medianet’s Amrita Sidhu.
Speaking at Mumbrella’s 2026 CommsCon in Sydney, Sidhu, Medianet’s managing director, said that while media organisations are adopting AI in their workflows, journalists do not extend the same expectations to the PRs who pitch them.
Pointing to this “clear inconsistency,” she told the audience that journalists can almost always spot AI-generated pitches and will automatically view them as “PR slop.”
“[To journalists], an AI-generated pitch signals a lazy pitch,” she said.
“A non-researched pitch. A potentially false pitch. It goes directly to trust. As one journalist put it, AI-generated pitches suggest a high chance of false information, poor grammar, wrong contact details, and incorrect data.
“Make no mistake: most will lose trust in the pitch, and in you, if they suspect it’s AI-generated.”
According to Medianet’s 2026 Medianet Media Landscape Report, which surveyed 800 journalists, three-quarters said they received PR pitches suggestive of being generated by AI and half “almost always detect machine-written copy”.
Sidhu noted that journalists are increasingly using AI themselves—mainly for research, transcripts, and proofreading—but when it comes to content generation, it’s far less trusted.
“They don’t want to use it for writing, and they don’t want you to either. Otherwise, you risk being seen as producing ‘PR slop,’ directly impacting trust.”
Amid this, journalists are relying more than ever on press releases for news gathering.
Notably, the use of social media has faced a continued decline among journalists, particularly the use of X (formerly Twitter), which has dropped sharply—from 73% in 2019–2020 to just 36%. Facebook remains the most used social platform, with around 75% citing it as a source, though trust issues persist, Sidhu said.
Now, 86% of journalists cite press releases as a key source, surpassing both social media and journalists’ own contact books.
According to Sidhu, this marks the first time since Medianet began its annual Media Landscape Report in 2019 that press releases have overtaken industry contacts as the top source for story gathering.
“News media in Australia is placing ever greater importance on high-quality PR material,” she said. “Squeezed by a lack of resources and facing uncertainty, PR is seen as a helping hand to get access to stories and people that may otherwise be unreachable. Trusted sources, including PR and press releases, are filling that void: they always have, in my opinion.”
However, she cautioned that PRs who fail to demonstrate personalisation or show that they’ve “done their homework” risk being perceived as inexperienced or out of touch, especially for specialist media.
“This is still a relational industry because trust and human discretion still matter,” she added.
