WASHINGTON—After a win on December 3 against Politico management’s infiltration of artificial intelligence (AI)-created material into news stories, The News Guild/CWA launched a nationwide “News, Not Slop” campaign to call attention to the threat to both workers’ jobs and news consumers’ rights to truthful reports.
The campaign wants readers, viewers, and journalists to target news editors and demand AI-generated “copy” be kept out of stories, with reliance on reporting from actual human beings, documents, and events.
The “News Not Slop” campaign is important for both workers and news consumers. For workers, it put the brakes on management substitution of AI-generated “news,” untouched by human hands. So did the pro-worker arbitrator’s ruling leading up to the News Guild’s campaign.
AI substitution lets bosses save money by employing AI, not humans, thus increasing profits in an industry still reeling from the mass migration of its main revenue base, ads, to the Internet, starting in 2005.
And it’s important for consumers, as the prior case involving Politico revealed, because curbing AI also curbs its errors—which often occur. In one instance last year, AI inserted into a story about the Democratic Convention the “fact” of the nationwide right to abortion and reproductive choice. The right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court had obliterated that right in 2022.
“Machines create slop without human control, don’t have feelings, and don’t care about the facts. Journalists must have the final say in published work,” the Guild asserted in a prior statement.
The win came in an arbitration pitting Politico and its E&E (Energy & Environment) News against its unionized journalists, members of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
The arbitrator ruled for the workers, saying the bosses violated the contract’s terms by inserting the AI copy without bargaining with the Guild over the issue. The contract required 60 days’ notice of such plans, followed by bargaining over AI’s insertions—and limits.
That win flagged the entire Guild to the AI insertion threat, and News Guild President Jon Schleuss launched the drive. It’s at www.newsnotslop.org.
“Unionists are the ones fighting for accurate news when companies roll out AI, spreading misinformation,” said Schleuss. “Journalists, by unionizing and demanding quality for their readers, are negotiating stronger ethics, accountability, and actual humans producing the news.
“This ruling is a strong message to every media boss: AI must be implemented responsibly, transparently, and through negotiation with journalists.”
The “News, Not Slop” drive demands “common-sense protections around artificial intelligence in media, fighting to ensure that AI slop and misinformation doesn’t erode the integrity and reliability of the news coverage we all rely on,” the Guild said.
“Supporters of ethical, human-made journalism can join the fight by signing their name to a petition targeting newsroom editors across North America.”
The arbitrator ruled Politico bosses violated the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s contract’s AI provisions in two ways: “By inserting AI-created ‘live’ summaries of news with factual and style-book errors, and via an AI Report Builder that created inaccurate reports while citing journalists’ work, lacked any human review, and was riddled with errors.”
“If the goal is speed and the cost is accuracy and accountability, AI is the clear winner. If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output, which are accuracy and reliability,” the arbitrator wrote.
“This ruling is a clear affirmation AI cannot be deployed as a shortcut around union rights, ethical journalism, or human judgment,” Politico Unit Chair Ariel Wittenberg said in a statement. “This is a win for our members fighting to ensure AI strengthens our newsroom rather than undermining it.”
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