Blood in the Machine: “…This week, we’ll dive into a subject close to home: Working journalists’ escalating struggles with AI, through the lens of one major newsroom’s efforts to stop media executives from unleashing AI indiscriminately on its editorial operations. Plus, a new bill proposed in New York might actually have the teeth necessary to push back on executives trying to automate journalism… This divide, between media executives, enamored with tech companies’ promises of new efficiencies and labor savings and eager to embrace AI, and journalists, who work for them and must abide by their directives, and are tasked with using the often unreliable automation software on the ground, often in high-stakes situations, is only widening. While media executives make headlines with sweeping declarations about the AI future, frustrations, anger, and tensions among many rank-and-file journalists are rising. After all, journalism is a field where both speed and accuracy are paramount, and AI tools, with well-known reliability and ethical issues, even at their best, can complicate the equation. Trust in the industry has already eroded, and fears like those articulated by the PEN Guild, that a rush to embrace AI tools will lead to sloppier, mistake-riddled output that further corrodes journalists’ reputation—and risks replacing them in the process—are spreading. It does not help matters that journalism is also a field in existential peril—newsrooms are shrinking, primarily thanks to the tech giants that have taken control over distribution infrastructure and eaten into advertising revenue—and AI is the latest technology that executives have found hope for salvation in. Much of media’s executive and managerial class remains bullish on AI, despite stumbles, shortcomings and even deeply embarrassing and high-profile scandals. That AI has both-sides’d the KKK at the LA Times, generated summer reading lists full of made-up books for the Chicago Tribune, and led to comically bottom-of-the-barrel content at Sports Illustrated seems to have dissuaded few executives from continuing to sing the praises of the technology…”

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