Greg Canty Fuzion Blog

I am sure that we have all heard at this stage about the debacle at Mediahaus Ireland with their chief executive, Peter Vandermeersch being suspended because of his use of AI in articles of his, whereby “quotes” by people were used which never happened.

For those who aren’t familiar with this strangely named business, it is the Belgian company that publishes the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Belfast Telegraph, the Sunday World, Sunday Life, The Herald and 11 regional newspapers.

In the excellent article by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times about this debacle, he explains in detail the high opinion of this veteran journalist in the industry, who on many occasions had warned his own teams about not using the technology for shortcuts in their work.

Knowledge, Experience and Expertise

One of my big arguments against the use of AI to fast track your work, is that not everyone has the ability to decipher what is bullshit and what is not, when reviewing what the platforms spew back at you.

For example you would think that a veteran journalist such as Peter would have the knowledge, experience and expertise to carefully “review the spew”, edit it accordingly and transform it into something well written, very intelligent and accurate.

I would argue that you only acquire that knowledge, experience and expertise by doing the hard yards, punching in your time, learning and perfecting your craft – there are no shortcuts !! (despite being told there are by AI promoters).

Peter certainly has done the hard yards and hasn’t earned that excellent reputation overnight, but it still wasn’t enough to protect him from self sabotage at the hands of this technology.

Review the Spew

Conversely you would extremely caution young bucks who don’t have the knowledge, experience and expertise, about using AI in their work, because quite simply they don’t have the ability to “review the spew” and errors are extremely likely.

Now here is the big problem – If you asked any of us if we thought we would have the necessary knowledge, experience and expertise to “review the spew” and carefully craft wonderful pieces from the AI generated content, we would probably say “of course”, over estimating our own prowess.

If Peter can’t do it, then the rest of us shouldn’t even attempt to do it.

The Bad News

You will only get good at your craft by doing the hard yards. AI shortcuts will certainly give you more time, but you will learn nothing by taking them, they will be error prone, you will lose yourself in the process and could potentially land you in extremely embarrassing situations with all of your credibility lost.

Furthermore, if the content that you are required to produce doesn’t need your knowledge, experience and expertise then why bother with it?

Greg

Greg Canty is the Managing Partner of Fuzion, a Brand Communications Agency in Ireland with offices in Dublin and Cork.

p.s. I’m not a good writer, this piece could have typos and grammatical errors but they are all mine, 100%

Tags: ai, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, Greg Canty, peter-vandermeersch, Technology, writing

This entry was posted on March 24, 2026 at 10:19 am and is filed under Communications, Ethics, Reputation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.