Museum of Public Relations launches AI persona of Edward Bernays

By AI, Created 10:25 PM UTC, May 19, 2026, /AGP/ – The Museum of Public Relations has launched “Ask Eddie,” a new AI platform that lets users hold spoken conversations with an Edward Bernays persona built from his writings and recordings. The project is designed for PR students, scholars and practitioners, and aims to turn historical PR thinking into an interactive teaching tool.

Why it matters: - The Museum of Public Relations is trying to turn archival material into an interactive learning tool for PR education. - The Bernays persona could help students and researchers explore public relations history, campaign strategy and controversial campaigns in a conversational format. - The project may also give practitioners a new way to study crisis communication, market research and campaign development through a historical lens.

What happened: - The Museum of Public Relations announced the launch of “Ask Eddie,” a first-of-its-kind AI platform that enables life-like conversations with historical figures. - The first release is an AI persona of Edward Bernays, built entirely from more than one million words of his own writings. - Agentic audio technology lets users ask questions out loud. - Generative voice technology produces responses that simulate Bernays’s voice using Museum of Public Relations recordings made while Bernays was alive.

The details: - The Bernays persona is the first entry in the Museum of Public Relations’ “Living Archives” series. - Future entries in the series will also be based on the subject’s own writings and recordings. - The system does not access contemporary data. - The system cannot draw on information beyond the subject’s lifetime. - The platform can answer hypothetical scenarios, which the museum says will help students test current issues from the subject’s perspective. - “Ask Eddie” was developed with Edelman. - Edelman’s Archie AI Personas methodology informed the project’s AI modeling approach. - That methodology organizes and prepares material for AI training. - The methodology also defines tone and behavioral characteristics. - It also applies guardrails and quality checks to platform output. - The museum prepared a teacher’s guide for college public relations programs. - The guide is meant to steer student use, suggest inquiry topics, recommend assignments and support classroom discussion. - The museum said the platform is mainly for PR and communications students. - The museum also sees use cases for students and scholars in history, political science, social science and American studies. - PR practitioners may also use Bernays’s experience as a reference for campaign development, market research and crisis communication. - Aimee Christian, Ph.D., Sandra Frazier Professor of Public Relations at Boston University, said the voice and content make the experience feel like speaking with Bernays himself. - Anthony D’Angelo, APR, Fellow PRSA, chair of the Public Relations Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, said the AI makes it easier to explore controversial campaigns in historical context. - Shelley Spector, PRMuseum CEO, said the project would not have been possible without the agreement and support of the Bernays family. - The museum says the project preserves Bernays’s legacy in an immersive way. - The museum describes the project as distinctive because it combines a domain-specific LLM, a cloned voice and open-ended conversation for one historical professional figure. - The museum says most existing projects use only one or two of those elements. - The museum also says the project is among the first to deploy that combination in a professional or institutional setting. - The museum included a LinkedIn page for more information: the museum’s social media page.

Between the lines: - The launch signals a push to use AI not just for content search, but for historical simulation and classroom discussion. - By limiting the system to a subject’s lifetime, the museum is trying to keep the persona anchored to historical sources instead of current events. - The project’s value depends on how well users treat the output as a teaching tool rather than a definitive historical authority.

What’s next: - The museum expects the teacher’s guide to help expand adoption in college classrooms. - The “Living Archives” series suggests additional historical personas could follow Edward Bernays. - Broader use by scholars and practitioners will likely depend on how educators and institutions respond to the first release.