Polico became one Of the first news rooms last year to win a trade union contract with rules on how the media -outlet can use artificial intelligence. The Pengilde, which represents polico and his sister publication, environment and energy site E&E News, is now preparing for another. The members of the trade union claim that the AI provisions have been violated in their contract and that they are preparing for a groundbreaking legal dispute with management. The outcome could be a precedent for how many input journalists ultimately have about how AI is used in their newsrooms.
Last year, AI generated by AI began to publish live news entrepreneurs during major political events such as the Democratic National Convention and the American vice-presidential debates. In March it debuted a series of AI tools called Policy Intelligence Assistance for paying subscribers, which were built in collaboration with the Y Combinator-Stunder Startup Capitol AI. Politico director Rachel Loeffler described the initiative at the time as “seamless integration of generative AI with our unparalleled policy expertise.”
However, Politico Union members claim that these tools have violated their contracts in different ways and take the dispute in July. “The company is obliged to inform us for 60 days of any use of new technology that will influence the tasks of negotiation unit,” says Pen Union chairman and E&E Public Health reporter Ariel Wittenberg. The trade union claims that neither notification has nor an opportunity to negotiate in good faith about the AI breakdown of Politico, and that the tools work that would normally be done by human staff.
“This is not just a contract conflict, it is a test or journalists have a say in how AI is used in our work. Without federal rules, trade union contracts remain one of the few enforceable frameworks for AI answering on a national scale,” says news guild president Jon Schleuss. (Pen Guild is a unit within NewsLild, one of the most prominent trade unions for journalists.)
Polrico says that the publication “takes the obligations under its collective employment contract seriously”, and “will continue to honor those obligations and at the same time quickly embrace transformative technologies such as AI that bring about a revolution in how our public consumes news and information,” said spokesperson Heather Riley.
The Police contract stipulates that the publication AI must use in a way that follows the standards of the company for journalistic ethics. “We are not against AI, but it must be held to the same ethical and style standards as our political journalists,” says Arianna Skibell, vice chairman of the trade union for contract enforcement, who writes the newsletter of the energy industry of Poloo. Some trade union members wonder whether there is always appropriate human supervision about the AI content that Polito publishes.
In one case, a language generated by AI generated by AI about immigration that human writers are not allowed to use, whereby sentences such as 'criminal migrants' are published because it dealt with vice-presidential debates.
“There were also factual mistakes that the AI inserted that night,” says Skibell. For example, she says that the AI -Arrested Actions of the Biden administration as did Kamala Harris. That message was later changed for replacements without the errors, according to Screenshots assessed by Wired. “In Poloo you cannot simply down articles written by human reporters without going through a series of approvals, entirely to leadership of Newsroom. That did not happen for AI's live compiling,” Wittenberg claims. (Politico did not comment on the details of the allie allegations.)
