Dr Iqbal Survé delivered this keynote address at the PR Worx 25th Anniversary Black Tie Celebration.
Programme Director, Madelain Roscher, the PR Worx team, distinguished guests, business leaders, colleagues and friends.
Congratulations to PR Worx on twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of helping organisations communicate, build relationships and protect their reputations is a remarkable achievement. In that time the platforms have changed, the speed has accelerated, and now artificial intelligence is changing the ground beneath all of us.
Yet one question has not changed: how do we establish what is true, communicate it responsibly, and earn the confidence of the people we serve? That question joins public relations, business and journalism. And my answer tonight can be said in three sentences.
Technology is a tool. AI is a tool. Journalism is an art.
Journalism is storytelling. Not entertainment, but the disciplined telling of what happened. When, and on what date? Who were the characters? What was the context? What had changed? Take away any one of these and a story becomes a rumour.
And every generation has told that story through a new technology. Motion pictures gave us the moving image. If you have not read Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, I recommend it. Here was an artist who made his name in the silent era, watched sound arrive, and in Modern Times asked what the machine was doing to the people who served it.
Radio carried the news into our homes. Television brought events into the living room. In South Africa, regular broadcasts began in January 1976. Then came the internet, Google and search engine optimisation, which rearranged how stories are found and how they are paid for.
Think of what that meant. When a family gathered around the radio, or waited for the evening bulletin, they were not trusting the box. They were trusting the people behind it, the editors who decided what was true enough to broadcast. The technology delivered the news. The institution vouched for it.
Each time, technology was the disruptor. Each time, journalism changed form but did not disappear. Technology has always evolved. This is nothing new. What is new is that knowledge has never been so available, and yet availability is not wisdom.
And at every point in that cycle, when people needed to know whether something was true, they looked for a name they trusted. A masthead. A broadcaster. A byline.
Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee, reflecting on the relationship between truth and storytelling, asks whether we should strive for “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. It is a question that goes to the heart of journalism. Our responsibility is not merely to report isolated facts, but to establish what is true, provide context and resist the temptation to omit what complicates the story. In an age of artificial intelligence, that responsibility becomes more important than ever.
A tool and an art
AI can transcribe an interview, translate a language, search ten thousand documents and find a pattern a human would miss. These are real gifts, and they give reporters more time to do what only reporters can do.
But AI can also invent a quotation, fabricate an image, and deliver a wrong answer in a confident voice. It can find a pattern without knowing the cause. It can tell you what, and never ask whether it should be published.
We already had a pivotal shift in the content available on the internet, where the majority is no longer generated by human sources. This means we have AI learning from other AI and bots rather than from real human content. This is a scary thing to note because it means we are no longer in charge of the narrative. Instead, we are using algorithms that rely on the most likely answer or the most common set of words that appears as a prediction of what fills the internet.
Listen to the people who know the technology best. Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA), whose company’s chips power this revolution, has said we have to get to a point where the answer you get is one you “largely trust”. He says we are still several years away. And when he uses AI himself, he asks it: “Are you sure this is the best answer you can provide?” That is a journalist’s question.
Listen also to the people who run the newsrooms. Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, puts it plainly: “AI can’t hold the powerful to account. AI can’t do on-the-ground reporting.” And Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, told the world’s news publishers in June that AI companies are failing “to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information.”
The technologists say: question the machine. The editors say: the machine cannot do our job. I say they are describing the same truth. The tool amplifies. The art decides what is worth amplifying.
A tool does what it is told. An art brings perspective. A good journalist knows which question to ask, which silence is telling, which voice is missing from the room. AI can bring a kind of perspective too, drawn from everything that has been written. But it is not the same kind. It has read about the flood. It has never stood in the water.
This isn't a scenario where it's AI versus journalism and PR. It's very much a scenario where it needs to be AI versus journalism, PR, and AI. AI is fundamentally changing the work we do, the processes we use, and enhancing our capability to report at even deeper levels and at even faster turnarounds.
What do we mean by trusted journalism?
Let us be honest about the word. Trusted journalism does not mean journalism that never errs. It means journalism that verifies, separates fact from opinion, treats people fairly, and corrects itself in the open.
And we must ask a harder question. Can journalists be trusted today? In some audiences, a fluent answer from a machine is now believed more readily than a byline. We should not dismiss that. We should ask why. Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable: errors that were never corrected, opinion dressed as fact, newsrooms distant from the communities they serve.
A machine has no editor and no byline. But a journalist can explain how a story was established. A correction can be demanded. A publication can be held to account. Those are not relics of an older era. They are the very reasons trust is possible.
Trust is not generated. It is earned, through conduct.
A charter for the AI era
So we must lay the foundation first: trust, ethics and values, agreed before the technology arrives in the newsroom, not after the damage is done.
We do not need to start from nothing. In November 2023, Reporters Without Borders and sixteen partner organisations published the Paris Charter on AI and Journalism, the first global ethical benchmark of its kind, chaired by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa. It says that ethics must govern technology choices, that human agency must stay central to editorial decisions, that media must be transparent about their use of AI, and that journalism must have a voice in how AI is governed. Ressa’s warning is worth repeating: innovation does not automatically mean progress; it must be steered by ethics. UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI says much the same, placing human rights, transparency and human oversight at the centre.
Across our own media businesses, we are working towards a compact built on those foundations. A named human being is accountable for everything we publish, whatever AI has touched. We verify before we publish. We tell audiences when AI has shaped what they are reading. We protect sources, personal data and unpublished work. And we do not let an algorithm become an invisible editor that narrows our stories, our languages and our voices.
A charter that sits in a drawer protects no one. It must show up in daily decisions: in the edit, in the headline, in the correction. Otherwise it is decoration.
The assumption behind every charter
But every charter carries a quiet assumption: that you have the technology, and that you have the journalism. Resources.
Original reporting is expensive. Reporters spend months in courtrooms and communities, verifying documents others would prefer to bury. An AI system can summarise their work in seconds. If the newsroom that funded it is not recognised or paid, who will fund the next investigation?
The International News Media Association has been making this point. At an INMA webinar this year, Pradeep Gairola of The Hindu observed that without a continuous supply of new, original, human-reported knowledge, AI models will degrade. In other words, AI needs journalism to survive. That gives publishers a leverage they have never had before, and we should use it, for fair arrangements and fair value.
Real reporting, investigative journalism, and branding are going to become the most valuable assets for any company or individual in the future. The difference between what stands out and what gets lost in the era of AI slop, however, will be intention and thought.
For Africa, the stakes are higher. If our newsrooms cannot afford to tell African stories, our societies will be described by records assembled by others, in other languages, for other priorities. African journalism is public infrastructure. It must be funded as if it matters, because it does.
Africa is in a unique position: we do not have the same limitations that the U.S. and Europe have due to their saturated ecosystems and established syndicators. In Africa, no one is leading the narrative, and therefore the African story is getting lost. We need to ensure that, in this next generation, we have voices championing the African narrative and more. We need a collaboration across our continent to provide one source of truth for the reality of a population of over a 1 billion.
If you are dishonest, technology will not save you
This brings me back to this room. Customers, investors and future employees will increasingly ask an AI system whether your organisation can be trusted. You will be tempted to optimise for that answer. Visibility can be bought. Credibility must be earned.
The answer such a system gives will be built from the public record: what journalists have reported, what regulators have filed, what you said, and what you did. If someone is dishonest, technology will not save them. It will only carry the dishonesty further and faster.
AI is available to help build out your digital track record, create your profile, and ensure that the information around you is consistent with what's needed out there today. There will always be a person driving that narrative. Now more than ever, it's important to start building real-world connection through your brand authority, whether that means starting out with social media reels or writing genuine LinkedIn leadership. The key will be a verifiable track record that doesn't sound generic because it's based on personal experience and real human connection.
Closing
There is an Afrikaans idiom from the sports field: “die beste speler kry die meeste slae.” The best players get the most beatings. It reminds us that those who perform at the highest level often face the greatest scrutiny, pressure and criticism. In journalism, public relations and business, success brings responsibility, and with it the expectation that we uphold the highest standards. The challenge is not to avoid the knocks, but to remain disciplined, principled and committed to the work, even when the pressure is greatest.
Nelson Mandela understood what is at stake. He said: “A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.” And he did not stop there. The press, he said, must have the economic strength to stand up to the blandishments of government officials, and enough independence from vested interests to be bold and inquiring without fear or favour. Hear what he is asking for: independence, resources and courage. That is the charter, the resources and the conduct, in one breath.
Technology will keep changing. It always has. Our task is to keep the tools in service of the truth, and to keep faith with the people who find it, test it and tell it.
Madelain, and everyone at PR Worx: congratulations on twenty-five years. May the next twenty-five be defined by your commitment to help shape change with integrity.
* Dr Iqbal Survé is the Chairperson of Survé Group Holdings.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL.