Our Demands
The NewsGuild-CWA represents 27,000 members across North America. Our members are deeply concerned that employers are using tools from for-profit companies to implement artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that damage the credibility of the news industry. We’re bargaining for and winning protections around AI so readers can trust the news they read.
What we’re fighting for:
AI for assistance, not for original work creation. Technology, like AI, can be a very helpful tool to speed up and automate tasks. It can help a novice programmer write faster code to scrape data from a website. It can help sift through hundreds of thousands of emails for an investigation. However, it should remain a supplement to human work and should not be used to write and publish articles without human oversight. 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.
No layoffs. No salary reductions. Some media companies have implemented layoffs to replace humans with robots. That’s led to fake news articles and product reviews done by fake reporters with AI-generated profiles. In our newsrooms, we fight to prioritize work created by humans and protect against layoffs and salary reductions. The people in our communities deserve the dignity of coverage by human beings. Journalism for humans by humans.
Transparency is fundamental to our work. Journalists adhere to ethical standards to ensure that readers can rely on story after story, fact after fact. Any published AI-generated content must be identifiable as such. If a company is going to use AI to publish AI material, it needs to be clearly labeled so readers are not confused by the sloppy output of a machine system.
No training on our work or our likeness without our permission. Companies should not ink quick deals with AI juggernauts to pilfer our work for sloppy reproduction used to deceive the public. Third-party AI tech companies are profit-motivated and do not protect the likeness, voice or image of human creators. Unless a company gets consent, it shall not use our likenesses for training or the creation of a digital replica.
Journalists in control, not executives. Most media executives have no experience working in a newsroom and they should play no role in editorial decisions. Executives damage trust when they roll out AI “tools” that can rapidly generate new content that often spreads misinformation. It damages our brands, whether corporate or professional. So, executives should stay out of decisions that would fundamentally destroy the trust journalists have built with readers and audiences.
