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The AI Fight Brewing Inside the New York Times

Slashdot
2 months ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: How newsrooms should use AI -- or if they should at all -- has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees' jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity. [...] Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times) filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet. The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its "normal contractual process." "Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we've done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years," Rhoades Ha said. The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb. [...] [Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit's generative AI committee] emphasizes that the unit's position is not that AI shouldn't ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it's deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they're using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don't align with doing quality work. "It's going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want," he says. Two of the contentious AI tools mentioned in the report are DX and Glean. DX is an engineering productivity tool that tracks a developer's output, generative AI use, efficiency, and other related metrics. Meanwhile, Glean is an internal knowledge-search tool that indexes materials like wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails so employees can query company information. The concern, according to Times Tech Guild members, is that data meant to measure broader developer experience is now being applied to individuals and cited in performance or disciplinary contexts. There's also worry that it could be used to monitor individual contributions and produce false or misleading results.

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