The AI Fight Brewing Inside the New York Times (theverge.com) 23
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: How newsrooms should use AI -- or if they should at all -- has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees' jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity.
[...] Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times) filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet. The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its "normal contractual process." "Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we've done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years," Rhoades Ha said.
The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb. [...] [Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit's generative AI committee] emphasizes that the unit's position is not that AI shouldn't ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it's deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they're using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don't align with doing quality work. "It's going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want," he says. Two of the contentious AI tools mentioned in the report are DX and Glean. DX is an engineering productivity tool that tracks a developer's output, generative AI use, efficiency, and other related metrics. Meanwhile, Glean is an internal knowledge-search tool that indexes materials like wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails so employees can query company information.
The concern, according to Times Tech Guild members, is that data meant to measure broader developer experience is now being applied to individuals and cited in performance or disciplinary contexts. There's also worry that it could be used to monitor individual contributions and produce false or misleading results.
[...] Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times) filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet. The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its "normal contractual process." "Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we've done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years," Rhoades Ha said.
The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb. [...] [Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit's generative AI committee] emphasizes that the unit's position is not that AI shouldn't ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it's deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they're using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don't align with doing quality work. "It's going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want," he says. Two of the contentious AI tools mentioned in the report are DX and Glean. DX is an engineering productivity tool that tracks a developer's output, generative AI use, efficiency, and other related metrics. Meanwhile, Glean is an internal knowledge-search tool that indexes materials like wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails so employees can query company information.
The concern, according to Times Tech Guild members, is that data meant to measure broader developer experience is now being applied to individuals and cited in performance or disciplinary contexts. There's also worry that it could be used to monitor individual contributions and produce false or misleading results.
Damn Communists (Score:4, Funny)
I am sick of these socialists and their damn unions, trying to ... um ... make my news more accurate! Those fricking commies!
Repeat and summarize ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sick of these socialists and their damn unions, trying to ... um ... make my news more accurate! Those fricking commies!
Uncritically repeating and summarizing what one side's spokespeople tell you is hardly "more accurate". What used to make journalists more accurate is applying some skepticism and doing their own investigations to confirm, to uncover the truth. Not just accept what people you like say.
Frankly, can we even tell if one of these repeat and summarize stories is human or AI written?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So since you feel the need to tell others to apply skepticism, you make sure you do that as well. I doubt you are, because you have not provided examples of how you achieve that. Instead you just snipe at people and assume they dont have the skills you dont have, and therefor should never believe anything anywhere, except where it agrees with your viewpoint.
I doubt you noticed the nuance or even got this far in my post, so Ill go ahead and say "good job" f
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Uncritically repeating and summarizing what one side's spokespeople tell you is hardly "more accurate". What used to make journalists more accurate is applying some skepticism and doing their own investigations to confirm, to uncover the truth. Not just accept what people you like say.
So since you feel the need to tell others to apply skepticism, you make sure you do that as well. I doubt you are, ...,
You are mistaken.
... because you have not provided examples of how you achieve that.
You are very mistaken. Re-read and note "What used to make journalists more accurate is applying some skepticism and doing their own investigations to confirm, to uncover the truth. Not just accept what people you like say."
Instead you just snipe at people and assume they dont have the skills you dont have, ...
Are you familiar with the phrase "psychological projection"?
Re: (Score:2)
Oof.
May your narcissism protect you from the evils of the world that no one but you knows about and therefor you are the only one ever in this entire world to get how wrong everyone is.
Re:Repeat and summarize ... (Score:2)
I am sick of these socialists and their damn unions, trying to ... um ... make my news more accurate! Those fricking commies!
Uncritically repeating and summarizing what one side's spokespeople tell you is hardly "more accurate". What used to make journalists more accurate is applying some skepticism and doing their own investigations to confirm, to uncover the truth. Not just accept what people you like say.
Frankly, can we even tell if one of these repeat and summarize stories is human or AI written?
Well,
Re: (Score:2)
Uncritically repeating and summarizing what one side's spokespeople tell you is hardly "more accurate"
For a second there, I thought you were describing Fox News.
Re: (Score:2)
Uncritically repeating and summarizing what one side's spokespeople tell you is hardly "more accurate"
For a second there, I thought you were describing Fox News.
I am describing news source both on the left and right. That said, they also all tell the truth when it is coincidentally matching their politics.
"And then they came for me..." (Score:5, Insightful)
When the "anything for a profit" motivations of modern capitalism steamrolled over laborers of all stripes, it was "Don't worry--we'll retrain them and they'll get better jobs."
Now the white collar workers are next. Why don't they learn a manual trade, or move to where the work is? Lazy bastards. /s
The AI Fight is Starting Everywhere (Score:2)
Automation has Been Eroding Journalism for Decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
TLDR: The 4th estate should just parrot the ministry of truth
It does when the people they like get elected.
Re:The most valuable lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
Just a disclosure of source documents would help.
A journalistic code of ethics where the reporters are disclosing at the media biases, source biases at the top of the article would help.
1) don't equate individual events and blame a larger group (nadir fallacy / association fallacy)
2) don't report opinions as science or proven facts just based on them originating in an academic journal, questionable methodology in an academic paper, academic expert's opinions'
3) don't equate anecdotes as news, a trend, an epidemic
4) don't confuse a civil case loss with a criminal case conviction or use the definition of the crime as a name for the civil case
5) don't report on the laundry list of past real or imagined historical events as grounds for a call to action / fix this crisis agenda
6) don't parrot think tank or agenda based nonprofit 'research'
7) don't invent new agenda based terminology,
8) disclose the political bias, employment bias, social biases of experts quoted,
9) avoid having persons not in a demographic group write about the life experiences, issues, problems of people in the demographic group
10) don't do the end of life, end of political career, end of business career, etc. articles with the "ten musicians (former music star) hated to work with" agenda
11) don't repackage the book tour press package as news or report on the two or three outrageous revelations from a tell all book
12) don't report on political investigations which have only allegations, testimony
Re: (Score:3)
13) Disclose if an interview has prepared questions and prepared answers
14) Disclose if an interview was scripted or based on press kit from the interviewee
15) Disclose if the article is just another low effort social media scraping
16) Report medical news for medical conditions affecting women and men from both the men's perspective and the woman's perspective, not just one gender repeatedly with a non-valid "it also affects the other gender too" fake equality
The appeal to authority fallacy (Score:2)
2) don't report opinions as science or proven facts just based on them originating in an academic journal, questionable methodology in an academic paper, academic expert's opinions'
The appeal to authority fallacy.
A real authority is not one who points at a diploma or prestigious title and says "trust me". A real authority has the ability to present the facts and figures in an understandable and persuasive manner. So that the audience can understand the evidence.
AI can't investigate (Score:4, Interesting)
If an AI is replacing a journalist they weren't a good journalist to start with.
*It has always been a pet peeve of mine that the sports writers can do statistics, budgets and basic math so much better than all the other journalists including economists and the finance section. Heck, the sports pages can have rational discussions about spending and budget decisions.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your conception of AI is a little out of date.
AI can in fact go to a site and verify the details. It's actually pretty good at it.
AI may not be able to initiate phone calls to get information, but who does that these days?
AI can scan through thousands of documents looking for things, much faster and more thoroughly than a human.
Try this: Load an insurance policy PDF into Chrome or Edge. Ask Gemini or Copilot questions about what is in that policy. It's a simple test that can be done on a large scale