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So how are working journalists and advocates of a healthy free press dealing with those executive pressures, and the chaos sown by AI interests? Organizing. It might not garner as many headlines as executive statements, but there is a lot of pioneering work being done to confront and constrain AI overreach in two key arenas: Organized labor and legislation.

The PEN Guild’s contract, for instance, contains strong language that limits the ways that AI can be used by management, and seeks to ensure that AI will benefit journalists and not just executives—if that contract is honored, of course. PEN isn’t alone, though its contract is one of the most powerful. The News Guild counts more than three dozen newsroom union contracts that now cover AI provisions. As the Guild puts it, “There are some gold standard examples that cover three priorities: protection of bargaining unit work, clearly defining the scope of AI and requiring interaction and oversight by bargaining unit employees to create work products.”

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And now, there’s an effort to codify such protections into law. This July, New York state legislators proposed a bill that would require news media employers to “fully disclose to workers when and how any generative AI tool is used in the workplace as it relates to the creation of content,” as well as labeling AI-generated output for consumers, requiring notice, consent, and human oversight of AI tools—and restrictions on using AI to replace journalists or their work. New York, of course, is the nerve center for the American media industry, so the impacts of such a bill could be profound. (It’s also worth noting that this is exactly the kind of bill that Meta, Google, OpenAI, and their allies in the GOP were hoping to ban with their AI law moratorium amendment that only narrowly failed to make it onto the recent budget bill.)

“This bill makes sure that workers are not simply informed when employers want to introduce a new technology, but have a real say in how it will be used—and the power to say no," says Mishal Khan, a senior researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. "This bill provides a crucial example of unions leading the way in crafting ambitious public policy that benefits all workers in the industry. It also offers a template for regulation in other sectors where new technologies continue to be rolled out with almost no guardrails."

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