One senior figure at the Associated Press appears to have caught a terminal case of tech CEO brain.
According to new reporting by Semafor, the news wire’s product manager for AI strategy Aimee Rinehart embraced her inner “Star Trek” villain by bluntly telling her stuck-in-the-past, pencil-pushing grunts that resistance to AI is “futile.” Reporters, not heeding her warning, rebelled anyway.
The internal controversy played out as AP staffers discussed how the Cleveland paper The Plain Dealer embraced using an “AI rewrite specialist” to turn reporters’ field notes into full-blown articles. The paper’s editor had lamented how an intern pulled out of a reporting fellowship after discovering that the position required feeding notes into an AI writing tool instead of writing stories.
Though the editor’s complaints earned widespread public ridicule, Rinehart sympathized with efforts to heavily integrate AI into newsrooms.
“Because local newsrooms are so strapped, they are turning for assistance on the news making process in every direction,” Rinehart wrote in a company Slack message. “Advance Publications got there first, others will follow,” she added, referring to the Plain Dealer’s publisher. “Resistance is futile.”
Spinning a yarn, Rinehart also claimed that some editors told her that they would “prefer to have reporters report and have articles at least pre-written by AI.”
“There are many — and I mean MANY — editors who would prefer an AI-written article to a human-written one,” she wrote. “Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare — RARE — is the occasion when it’s wrapped into one person.”
Her proclamations sparked dissent among staffers.
One AP reporter fumed that the “dismissiveness and disdain some of you have shown for human writing are insulting and abhorrent,” per Semafor. “Strong reporting and clear writing are the lifeblood of journalism, not AI-written slop.”
“AI may be inevitable,” the reporter continued, “but denigrating the work of colleagues who write for a living without whom there would be no AP, is disgraceful.”
Another staffer said it is “hard not to escape the feeling that the people hyping/guiding the decisions around these powerful tools exist in a totally different reality than the people who wake up every day and do the work of reporting.”
The internal strife comes as news organizations experiment with AI, despite it remaining controversial with rank and file journalists, and frequently causing mistakes.
In December, The Washington Post launched an AI-generated podcast feature for summarizing a personalized curation of the paper’s latest stories to users. Prone to hallucinating like any other AI tech, the podcasts turned out to be riddled with factual errors like fabricated quotes, along with editorializing on developing stories. Readers mocked the initiative, and WaPo staffers rebelled against management, blasting the AI launch as a “disaster.”
Last month, a senior Ars Technica reporter was caught accidentally using AI-fabricated quotes in an article, forcing the publication to issue a retraction in an incident that went viral.
The reporter, Benj Edwards, was a seasoned tech journalist who was well aware of the technology’s risk, but let his guard down while using an AI to summarize his notes while trying to finish an article with a fever, he claimed. When the AI erroneously generated a made-up quote based on the real remarks the source made in an interview, it went unnoticed, underscoring how the tech’s introduction can lull even veterans into a false sense of security and lead to outright fabrications. Edwards was terminated by Ars following the incident.
In a statement to Semafor, the AP stated that the “internal discussion among staffers from different departments doesn’t reflect the overall position of the AP regarding the use of AI.”
“We’ve been an industry leader in setting AI standards that safeguard the vital role of journalists,” the statement continued, “while also allowing for AI use for things like language translation, summarizations, transcriptions and content tagging.”
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