Communication

As AI reshapes how content is created and distributed, it’s becoming harder to tell where words come from – and who stands behind them. When provenance fades, trust doesn’t vanish overnight. It thins, quietly, in ways communicators can’t afford to ignore.

A year of writing about AI led me back to one central idea: staying human is a choice. This year-end reflection explores human-centred AI, communication, ethics, and the judgement required as AI moves from abstraction to everyday reality.

AI can invent sources, quotes, and links with total confidence. If it touched your content, verification is no longer optional. Editors must now be fact-checkers. This is no longer best practice. It is the baseline.

Drawing on 23 candid interviews with senior communicators from global organisations, this review explores how today’s CCOs shape reputation, culture, and strategy across global organisations as the role evolves from reputation guardian to strategic partner in a rapidly changing world.

A run of recent Amazon delivery failures has made me rethink how much I can rely on a service I’ve trusted for 25 years. Silent drop-offs, inaccurate status alerts, and disappearing delivery photos point to a deeper issue: when communication slips, trust goes with it.

What began with a post about the em dash became a conversation about much more – how we think about voice, authenticity and the human mind in an AI-shaped world. The comments revealed concerns about something deeper - not about punctuation, but about identity and how we choose to sound.

ChatGPT now promises to stop using em dashes when instructed, ending a surprisingly noisy debate over a tiny punctuation mark. But the real story is how AI picked up the em dash from us in the first place – and what that says about voice, trust and the way we write today.

The Internet Archive has survived years of copyright battles, but at great cost. Half a million books are gone – erased by law. What does that mean for our shared digital memory, and what can we learn from the burning of books in the ancient Library of Alexandria?