AI Is Now Part of Every Crisis

9 May 2026 · 2 min

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2:06

In this presentation, TJ Walker explains how artificial intelligence has become a central force in modern crises. He describes how AI quickly generates summaries, captions, headlines, and even fabricated images, audio, and video after an incident occurs, creating multiple parallel narratives that can spread faster than an organization’s official response. Walker emphasizes that companies must act swiftly and define the situation early, because AI‑generated versions of events will fill any informational gap and can become hard to dislodge, even when they are known to be false. The talk highlights the dual challenge of managing what actually happened versus what appears to have happened, and stresses the need for rapid, clear communication to control the uncontrolled stream of AI‑produced content.

Chapters

Ultimize. 10 years ago, a crisis was shaped by reporters and public opinion. Today, it's also shaped by algorithms, and that includes artificial intelligence. AI is now a part of how crises are created, how they spread, and how people interpret what they see. Let me make this concrete for you. A short video appears online showing a tense interaction between an employee and a customer. Within minutes, AI tools are generating summaries of what happened. People are asking chat systems to explain the situation. Others are creating captions, headlines, and interpretation using AI. Some of those summaries are accurate, some are not. Some might even be hallucinations, but all of them sound confident. Now imagine you are the company involved. You're not just responding to what happened, you're responding to dozens, sometimes hundreds of AI-generated interpretations of what happened. And those interpretations can spread faster than your official statement. There's another layer to all this. AI can generate content that looks real, but isn't. Images can be altered, audio can be manipulated, video can be edited in ways that are difficult to detect. So now you're dealing with two problems at once. What actually happened, that could be a problem, and what appears to have happened. Those are not always the same thing. This is why you have to move faster and be clear, because if you do not define the situation early, AI-generated versions of the story will fill the gap. And once those versions take hold, they can be very hard to dislodge, even if everyone kind of knows it was AI-generated. If you look awful, that can be the image that sticks. So you're no longer just managing a crisis, you're managing a stream of content about that crisis, much of which you didn't create and might not even be real. Understanding that reality is essential because if you ignore it, you'll always feel like you're reacting too late.