Fighting the Machine

Journalists across the United States are fighting for contracts that address AI use: “We don’t want it to be done in our name, literally.”

On a chilly day in early April, outside the ProPublica offices in Lower Manhattan, dozens of union members staged a daylong strike—the first of its kind authorized at a major news organization to address, among other concerns, how AI would be used with its work. On the sidewalk, Agnel Philip, a data reporter at ProPublica and unit chair for the ProPublica Guild, told me that so far ProPublica has been conservative with AI. But “while the technology is new, and while places are sort of figuring out how they want to use it,” he said, “we want a seat at that table to make sure that its implementation is done well.”

Across the United States, journalists have been fighting for a say in how their newsrooms use AI, with varying degrees of success. On April 15, unionized staffers at EdSource, a nonprofit outlet covering education in California, held a lunchtime rally, demanding that their contract include protections against AI use, such as the right of reporters to remove their bylines from stories that involved the use of AI without their consent, and that the union, in addition to management, needs to approve the use of generative AI tools in the newsroom. A day later, Times Guild members brought newspapers to an all-company meeting at the New York Times that had been stenciled in bright red with the phrase REAL A.I. GUARDRAILS. And lately, employees at McClatchy newsrooms have spoken out against the company’s use of a “content scaling agent,” an AI tool powered by Anthropic’s Claude, to repackage reporters’ stories for specific audiences, while retaining their byline.