A tech entrepreneur has developed a cutting-edge tool that uses AI to create ethical, cyber secure and environmentally sustainable social media content thanks to the support of Lancaster University.

GhostPosts is a platform which generates inclusive content for businesses that can be used for social media. Using innovative machine learning and a series of prompts including writing style and audience, social posts are created in a matter of seconds, increasing efficiency and productivity, therefore reducing carbon footprint.

It was launched by entrepreneur Liam Brennan after he engaged in the Digital Security Hub (DiSH) powered by Barclays Eagle Labs, a collaborative ecosystem with lead academic partner Lancaster University and innovation experts Plexal working together to help startups, organisations and established businesses to foster innovation and growth.

The result was two ground-breaking research projects with the university focussed on the carbon footprint of social media and sustainable behaviour, and training AI to create ethical content.

Rebecca Robinson, Programme Lead for the Centre for Digital Innovation, part of Cyber Works at Lancaster University, said: “Liam is a unique and talented individual on a mission to share his tech know-how with businesses. It has been fantastic supporting the development of his GhostPosts venture through genuinely groundbreaking research.

“This is a great example of how Lancaster University can support a business from start-up to scale up, creating a link between academic knowledge and the practical application into industry, accelerating their growth and impact, while having a positive impact on the world.”

“Our mission is to empower businesses to embrace digital and cyber innovation, driving tangible improvements in products, processes, and services through innovative business strategies.”

The Inspiration

After 18 years working in tech for businesses including UKFast and THG, Liam launched Left Foot Forward, a technology innovation consultancy, based in Bolton, which supports business growth strategies.

Brimming with ideas, Liam secured a place on the 12-week Plexal Accelerator growth programme at DiSH, where he was able to develop an idea for a new Large Language Model (LLM) to help start-ups and small businesses create social media posts quicker and more effectively.

“My inspiration was related to the amount of resources that go into social media content if you are a small business,” Liam explained. “To develop social media content ideas, put the words together and create one post per day could add up to approximately 11 working days per year, more if you're including images, video content, posting more than once per day or supporting multiple brands. For a startup that is a huge resource which is likely to be outsourced, adding a cost burden and making consistency of tone an issue.

“I had been experimenting with public AI models like Chat GPT, training its responses to be more personalised: to sound more like me. I realised that I could create a software platform which allowed subscribers to benefit from the same process for a fraction of the cost and time. GhostPosts was born.”

While Liam developed the software with the support of the DiSH’s ecosystem of digital and cybersecurity experts, he was introduced to Lancaster University, a leader of digital innovation and security research and development, to test and improve GhostPosts.

“I was introduced to Rebecca Robinson who saw the potential for leveraging Lancaster’s academic resources. Our discussions were based around two challenges when it comes to AI: the environment and ethics.

“Digital content creation, especially on social media, has a hidden environmental cost, contributing to 262m tonnes of CO2e annually. It consumes vast amounts of data, storage and power so we can share something about our day, or a funny cat picture. When more users are online, more energy is used, begging the question: is there a more sustainable time of day to post content?

“Secondly, there is the issue of ethics. Can you create content that isn’t harmful, isn't hurtful, and doesn't aggravate people, but still gets your message across in the intended way. And can this process be automated?”

The Innovation

Lancaster University found two ways for the university to collaborate with Liam and GhostPosts.

The first was a student project by computer science postgraduate Autumn Aindow, which explored the energy consumption of different devices, connections and times of day to ascertain the approximate carbon cost of posting on social media. The findings were then used to support a survey of 100 businesses to better understand if this information could influence more sustainable behaviour.

Rebecca said: “Autumn produced a ground-breaking piece of research which ultimately helps companies identify greener ways of marketing online. It has supported GhostPosts’ development of a carbon calculator for the platform and demonstrated that with education and training, as well as an incentive, such as a financial saving, businesses are willing to change their behaviour and scheduling campaigns outside peak electricity usage hours, reducing environmental impact.”

The next collaboration was a Masters by Research project between GhostPosts, postgraduate student Ed Shirvington and Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications.

Funded by the Centre for Digital Innovation - a collective of universities, further education and industry partners making digital technology expertise and facilities available to businesses in the North West - the 12-month project is exploring how to enable GhostPosts to automatically add inclusive and ethical prompts behind the scenes to make sure the content is aligned to the principles and ethics of a business.

Rebecca explained: “One of the major challenges of using AI to generate content is the lack of a human touch, creativity and unique perspective, especially to achieve empathy and inclusiveness.

“Ed’s research aims to see if there is potential to train a LLM to flag problematic words and phrases which could be deemed unethical, biassed or hateful, and give the user an opportunity to rephrase, remove or rebalance the content.”

The Impact

A year on from the programme at DiSH, GhostPosts has come on leaps and bounds. Liam has been joined by development partner Paul Wilshaw, responsible for the platform's front end design and user experience.

GhostPosts is also now in beta mode, allowing its first real users to test the software in a real-world environment. Its subscription pricing model offers customers 20 social media posts for £2.99 per month.

Liam said: “Our platform is demonstrating tremendous capability. Using AI, we not only save that 45 minutes spent thinking of the content, giving you suggested posts in five seconds, we've also reduced the online energy consumption, as well by offloading it to a shared CPU in a green data centre, creating a faster, cheaper, greener social media content production process.”

DiSH provided Liam with acumen and confidence to develop his business ideas, GDPR and cyber security training, as well as created a wealth of connections including the peers on the programme and the ecosystem of industry and academia.

“We often look at universities as these silos of academia, when in fact they play a fundamental role in linking research and development to real world application. Lancaster University has gone above and beyond to support my ideas. Without Rebecca, the academics and students, GhostPosts wouldn’t be taking the shape it is.”

The Future

While GhostPosts currently uses ChatGPT for the basis of its conversions, the ambition is for it to be backed by its own AI model to support future investment, growth and the expansion of the team.

Liam said: “GhostPosts is a project that has unlocked an incredible amount of innovation potential. We are going off in many different directions: empowering businesses to do digital ethically and sustainably; creating research which never existed before; and forging countless connections across the region with people and organisations who share my passion for democratising technology.”

GhostPosts is just one example of many businesses, across all sectors, that Lancaster University is helping to approach digital innovation for growth, stability and security through its Cyber Works initiative.

Cyber Works links business to a community of multidisciplinary researchers and support opportunities via the internationally acclaimed Cyber Security Research Centre, based within the School of Computing and Communication at Lancaster University. These include the Centre for Digital Innovation, Cyber Foundry, Secure Growth Blackburn and Digital Security Hub (DiSH).

Ongoing opportunities through Cyber Works opportunities include workshops, technical developments, student internships, and masterclasses to equip SME business leaders with the tools to navigate cyber security's evolving landscape.

Find out more and contact us on cyberworks@lancaster.ac.uk.

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