Byline Strikes and AI

What follows is strictly my opinion and not generated by AI. 

The other day I saw this article in the New York Times:

Reporters at McClatchy Withhold Bylines in Dispute Over A.I. Content

Journalists at newspapers like The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee are refusing to let the chain use their names on summarized articles generated by a new A.I. tool.

Toward the end of my time with the online cryptocurrency news publication, one of the editors started to test artificial intelligence to write some of the features. We were told many, many times the AI-generated articles would be rigorously checked by a real live person to make sure whatever AI created was factually correct. 

(Vecteezy.com)

At the time I wondered why bother with AI if you were going to have a person check the article anyway. Then I wondered if this was a prelude to replacing news people to close the major budget hole created when the price of bitcoin went south and the publisher wanted to attract another owner for the publication. 

As it happened, I was not kept on staff long enough to find out how much AI would be used and what reporters and editors thought about it. Considering the firings before and after a new owner eventually came in, I wonder how much of the content is now generated by AI.

AI-written articles have become much more widespread in the three years since then. Ethical publications note the AI. Others ...

And don't forget the AI-generated pictures of celebrities and everyday people, images frequently used without the subjects' permission. You can't trust anything you see now, be it on TV, your computer or in your daily source of news.

Even LinkedIn, an important source for finding a job in journalism and maintaining contacts with others in the field, is using AI. 

According to Science News Today: Artificial intelligence can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience, recognizing patterns, understanding language, making decisions, solving problems, and sometimes even creating art or writing stories.

What once existed only in the pages of science fiction novels has now become part of everyday life.

Scary stuff.

Newspaper publishers and other corporate owners have another reason to use AI: It saves money. Publishers that won't pay reporters and editors a decent wage say they need AI to save money for more important things, like conferences.

But the reaction of the McClatchy staff reminded me that reporters have few ways of showing their displeasure with management other than leaving the office to stand on a picket line. Especially now when AI can replace them.

When I worked for a 5-day business newspaper decades ago we had a company union - it was not part of the News Guild (once known as the Newspaper Guild, but newspapers are on the decline) or the CWA, for instance. Reporters wanted a raise. Management said no. To show our displeasure we decided to keep working but withhold our bylines.

I forgot about this until I was going through all my accumulated newspapers to see which clippings I wanted to keep and found several weeks' worth of daily papers where there were no bylines, including mine. (In the end we got a very small raise out of our effort.) 

(Vecteezy.com)

What does a byline strike accomplish? Is the intent to embarrass the owner? I think that might happen only if star reporters - a Bob Woodward, for instance - withheld his or her byline. But, in my opinion, I don't think newspaper owners care, no matter what they say publicly. They are only looking at the bottom line. Jeff Bezos can literally afford to fire loads of people from the Washington Post, knowing he can take advantage of AI from his other company - Google.

So I can commiserate with the McClatchy reporters who are pissed off their work is being summarized by AI, which can completely mischaracterize or flat-out get wrong something the reporters worked hard over. If editors are fired, who checks? Answer: no one.

I hope their byline strike can accomplish something. But I have my doubts. 

AI is everywhere, in every industry. Titans of industry - JPMorgan and other financial firms - believe AI will save them billions of dollars, making them even richer. In a sad irony the tech firms that developed it are using AI and getting rid of huge swaths of employees. Newspapers are already a dying breed. Even those still publishing physical newspapers have had to adapt to the new reality of electronic delivery. I got the New York Times article I mentioned at the top of this post on my phone in a daily news summary, for instance. 

Can I trust what I am seeing? When I asked my browser to find me an article on the pitfalls of AI, up came an AI-generated summary. I ignored it.

Instead, I now quote again from Science News Today:

Like every powerful technology, artificial intelligence is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Its true impact depends on how humanity chooses to develop, regulate, and use it.

Pardon me for being a pessimist.