Newspaper Chain's Reporters Withhold Their Bylines to Protest 'AI-Assisted' Articles (spokesman.com) 21
A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times.
And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie."
The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind"....
McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication.
And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie."
The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind"....
McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication.
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You are wrong. Several reporters and columnists have been important voices in the past. But quite possibly not this decade.
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When I see the word "billionaire" in a slashdot post...
I know it's rsilvergun.
It doesn't matter what the subject is, the billionaires are always at fault. Being a billionaire must be kind of like being a husband!
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Slop Subscription (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly who's going to pay money for obvious slop?
Re: Slop Subscription (Score:2)
Quality always beats quantity.
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Tell that to McDonalds.
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There are places where McDonalds have had to shut down due to competition with better quality.
Re: Slop Subscription (Score:1)
Ok which planet?
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Exactly who's going to pay money for obvious slop?
How about for questionable slop? Most of the AI stuff is perhaps detectable by highly trained individuals, but most readers are not highly trained. Also, many readers eagerly slurp up human-created slop of obvious low quality and accuracy, so why would there be a rejection of AI-created slop of obvious low quality and accuracy?
AI slop already works for revenue generation. That's why it's gaining steam. I'm not advocating for AI slop, but it's obvious that it's working, maybe not for the readership publi
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Engagement! (Score:2)
I love the idea that you can take an article and use AI to produce a spin that is acceptable to MAGA, a spin that is acceptable to libs, etc. See? Engagement achieved! And that's what "news" is really all about, right?
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One of the goals that the AI pushers proclaim is for every human to have their own dedicated AI Agent that sifts the raw newsfeed and crafts articles tailored to the individual's preferences. Individually tailored spin. Everything matched to our pre-existing biases. Comfort and outrage tailored to our individual expectations. 100% engagement.
another take (Score:2)
How about banning the editors from using AI? They want more output, they expect AI to be the answer; tell the journalists to use AI however they see fit to produce the various articles the editors want. They will be directly engaged and willing to put their names on the final product(s). Editors can give direction and have final say on what is or isn't published, but they aren't supposed to be writing the articles too.
The end of the dead tree media (Score:2)
"uses AI tools to summarize" ""help readers" (Score:2)
strategy post LLM AI (Score:2)
"Journalists who are defiant will fall behind" (Score:2)
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
capital and labor (Score:2)