QUESTION: How do we curb the proliferation of AI-slop in cybersecurity storytelling?
Elizabeth Safran, Founder, Looking Glass Public Relations: Let’s not let AI slop kill storytelling. But preventing it requires holding each other accountable.
One of the most valuable lessons I learned about cybersecurity storytelling came more than 20 years ago, and it didn’t come from a press relations or marketing guru. It came from Rhonda Maclean, one of the industry’s first female Fortune 500 CISOs (roles included Boeing, Bank of America, and Barclays) and the keynote speaker at the inaugural Executive Women’s Forum conference in 2003. Given how few women were at her level at the time, I expected her talk to be about female empowerment.
Perhaps it was, but what stuck with me all these years afterward was her belief that communicating the value she delivered to stakeholders that mattered was central to her success. By owning the narrative and telling the right stories, she built influence, respect, and political capital. She wasn’t just encouraging a room full of executives to become better self-promoters. Her point was that the ability to shape your story is a form of leadership.
She was right. And AI slop is eroding that ability, one LLM-generated post at a time.
Content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has steamrolled its way into cybersecurity storytelling, and from what I see, it’s already entrenched. Security professionals have embraced AI for content creation, unapologetically doubling down on rocket emojis, red checkmarks for bullets, and AI’s weakness to frame every idea in contrast (“it’s not this, it’s that!”).
When we delegate control of our narrative to an AI proxy, we sell ourselves short. We may save time, but we’re also handing our voice to a large language model (LLM). We are ceding our credibility to our software. Unless we start holding each other accountable for the content we produce, the problem will keep getting worse.
I was reminded of this twice recently.
The first was a product press release that was more sloppy storytelling than actual slop. “Mythos” was in the headline, subhead, and the first two paragraphs. The actual product news didn’t show up until paragraph three.
Companies want to rank in AI search results and align with larger industry conversations, and keywords matter for that. But when a press release becomes content for an algorithm rather than a document conveying news to media outlets, it’s not doing its job.
Vendors: Even if you don’t get coverage, respect the medium. Stick to the facts, position in the quotes, and trust that your audience can grasp what you’re announcing.
The second instance was pure AI slop: a LinkedIn humble-brag post by a respected member of the cybersecurity community. The post generated more than 100 likes and a dozen comments. The source material was not earned media; it was an AI-generated blog post “authored” by someone who runs an AI content generation platform. What bothered me about this post in particular was that it was based on out-of-date website scrapes that name-checked someone I know who passed away two years ago.
Both pieces presumably went through multiple rounds of review before publication, which means we are all complicit in letting AI slop persist.
Including me.
When I privately reached out to the person who posted it, I was so worried about offending them that my concerns and the points I was trying to make wERE long-winded and convoluted.
I’m part of the problem, too. This is me working on it.
AI is here to stay, and it’s incredibly useful. Most of us will keep using it. My concern is treating AI-generated content as finished content.
AI-generated content without meaningful human oversight increases the risk of misunderstanding, factual errors, and hallucinations. We’ve already seen AI hallucinations cause real damage in legal and scientific settings. Cybersecurity is not immune; the field is already plagued by complexity, misinformation, and hype.
Rhonda’s lesson wasn’t just about communication; it was about ownership. The people who build influence in cybersecurity are the ones who can explain what they’ve done, why it matters, and what they’ve learned from it. AI can help draft the story, but it can’t replace the experience that goes into it. And once credibility is lost, no prompt can restore it.
Want a narrative that resonates with humans? Keep the human in the loop.
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