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You're an AI expert, not an influencer? By Max Winger Published on February 17, 2026 Subheading Your hot takes are killing your credibility. Prior to my last year at Control AI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don't come from a background in public communications, but I've quickly learned some important rules.
The number one rule that I've seen far too many others in this field break is that you're an AI expert, not an influencer. There's an image here. Description. When communicating to an audience, your persona is one of two broad categories. Influencer or professional. influencers are individuals who build an audience around themselves as a person.
Their currency is popularity and their audience values them for who they are and what they believe, not just what they know. Professionals are individuals who appear in the public eye as representatives of their expertise or organization. Their currency is credibility and their audience values them for what they know and what they represent, not who they are.
So, let's say you're trying to be a public figure making a difference about AI risk. You've been on a podcast or two, maybe even on the news. You might work at an AI policy organization, or perhaps you're an independent professor, researcher, or even a spokesperson for a protest group.
Notably, you're not just a person shouting from the sidelines, you're someone building an actual platform as a spokesperson for this issue. That makes you a professional. But of course, even though you're not an influencer, you're a person with opinions about many things. For the sake of this piece, let's say the latest topic of heated political debate is over a new species of alpine worm.
Let's call this the alpine worm scandal. Today you saw an alpine worm in your garden and it's irritated you enough that you're gonna tweet about it. Subheading. Stop. What would media training Steve do?
Media training is often maligned as a dark art used by politicians to avoid answering questions, but it's actually quite important to understand what you should and shouldn't say based on your role for the sake of the audience, your credibility, and your message. Your role as a professional is to warn about AI risk, answer related questions, and present solutions. That's it.
Media Training Steve knows that while he has strong beliefs about the Alpine Worm scandal, so does his audience. In fact, because concern about AI is, currently, so non-partisan, he's cultivated an audience roughly split between pro-wormers, anti-wormers, and people who intentionally avoid worm politics altogether.
If Media Training Steve posts about his strong anti-worm views, this will likely… 1. Alienate portions of his pro-worm audience from him. 2. Allow his opposition cheat worm-based attacks against him. 3. Associate AI risk prevention as a whole with anti-wormerism. 4. Fail to influence his audience's views on alpine worms, presumably why he posted about the worms in the first place.
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