AI in the Beltway Media

Union members at Politico are angry because their bosses want to AI them out of existence:

Politico became one of the first newsrooms last year to win a union contract that included rules on how the media outlet can deploy artificial intelligence. The PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister publication, environment and energy site E&E News, is now gearing up for another first. The union’s members allege that the AI provisions in their contract have been violated, and they’re preparing for a groundbreaking legal dispute with management. The outcome could set a precedent for how much input journalists ultimately have over how AI is used in their newsrooms.

Last year, Politico began publishing AI-generated live news summaries during big political events like the Democratic National Convention and the US vice presidential debates. This March, it debuted a suite of AI tools called Policy Intelligence Assistance for paying subscribers, which were built in partnership with the Y Combinator-backed startup Capitol AI. Politico executive Rachel Loeffler described the initiative at the time as “seamlessly integrating generative AI with our unmatched policy expertise.”

Politico union members, however, allege these tools violated their contract in several ways, and are taking the dispute to arbitration this July. “The company is required to give us 60 days notice of any use of new technology that will materially and substantively impact bargaining unit job duties,” says PEN union chair and E&E public health reporter Ariel Wittenberg. The union claims that it was given neither notice nor an opportunity to bargain in good faith over Politico’s AI rollout, and that the tools do work that would ordinarily be done by human staff.

Politico is generally so bad and cliched that using AI almost makes sense for their largely garbage coverage. But there is a bigger issue at play here, which is the entire future of work. I can think of nothing more likely to make Americans double down on fascism that the widespread erasure of work by machines. You’d like to think that would lead to a workers’ revolt, but that requires people being ready to go to organize them and that doesn’t really exist, including within the unions, who after all are based on workplaces, so if everyone is fired and replaced by machines, they become irrelevant. Of course all the corporate leaders think this will lead to massive profit, forgetting that someone actually has to buy their product and if no one is working, no one can buy anything. In any case, we are going to see more and more fights over AI at the workplace.

We had better be ready to organize against this. But color me skeptical–technological fetishism is just as a strong among liberals as it is on the right. Even on the left, you have ridiculous “post-work” folks thinking this could free the working class from drudgery. To be replaced by spending all your time online and become an incel I guess, I don’t know, no one is articulating what useful thing people will do with their time. The strength and weakness of utopians is that they never really have to articulate what comes next, but with this dystopia likely to hit very soon, we need to figure it out yesterday.

And no, people are not just going to change their ideas of valuing work to fit the new norm. They will instead become resentful and angry and act accordingly.