We’ll soon be sitting down with Mother Jones & Reveal management to discuss the CIR Union’s demands for ethical, labor, and editorial safeguards around AI. A strong agreement is vital to protect the rights of workers and the reputation of our news organization. Here’s why: 🧵👇

Last year, our CEO warned readers that AI poses an “existential threat” to independent news. “This could kill journalism,” she wrote. We agree.

Obviously, we aren’t saying AI should never be used at all. But we are asking for two reasonable protections. 🔹Demand 1: Union work—and Union workers—must not be displaced by AI.

In short, don’t replace us with bots. The leadership of a magazine named for a legendary labor leader should be happy to make that commitment. And it needs to be universal—covering print and radio; art, production and sound; business ops; and everything else.

As our CEO has written (disapprovingly), “The big money loves the idea that artificial intelligence will replace journalists.” This practice is increasingly widespread, and we don’t want it to happen here. We doubt our readers or donors do, either. npr.org/2024/05/16/125…

🔹Demand 2: CIR must work with, and get consent from, the Union before implementing AI tools.

Last year, President Biden declared that workers should “have a seat at the table in determining how these technologies are developed and used” bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/…

VP Vance agrees: “For all major AI policy decisions coming from the federal government, the Trump Administration will guarantee American workers a seat at the table.” CIR’s policies should be at least as democratic and worker-friendly as the Trump admin’s youtu.be/ocfcVuuuMpQ?si…

Why do workers need a seat at the AI table? The threat to our livelihoods and working conditions is obvious. It’s clear that reckless use of AI could have catastrophic consequences for the reputations of our publications and the journalists who work here.

A BBC study of AI tools found that “51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form” and “13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article” bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/do…

In January, Apple was forced to suspend its AI news summary notification feature, which had concocted false stories and wrongly attributed them to real news outlets bbc.com/news/articles/…

Our editor-in-chief has written about how AI “enshitification” and “AI slop” has “ruined” search engines. We’re asking management to work with us to ensure AI enshitification never ruins Mother Jones and Reveal

Best of all, these are Union jobs!