It is an ongoing and perhaps inevitable reality that Artificial Intelligence is taking over publishing. Already, the tepid, homogenized, barely readable A.I. slop has leeched its way into the news landscape, and craven overlords at news outlets are using the eroding revenues at their sites as justification to make their barely passable entries more intolerable. That this bastardized content will only distance readers even more is something lost on those with alleged genuine intelligence.
We have cited cases of this for some time. At the Miami Herald, a few years ago, they went with an A.I. program to use for the boilerplate real estate listings. While this made sense to a degree, as these are comprised mostly of fundamental data points, what was notable and unsettling was that for a few days, these robot entries were the most read items at the paper. More recently, a writer revealed that at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, after applying for a position, he learned it would be little more than a minder for the A.I. content program they were instituting.
READ MORE: With Journalism on Life Support the Associated Press Wants to Pull the Plug, Demanding AI Reporting
Then, this March, I covered how none other than the Associated Press was announcing it was making this move to robotic article creation. (“The Automoton Press”?!) Its reporters were to become little more than fact feeders, essentially reduced to submitting crude outlines on the fly, and then the A.I. would take over and belch out the articles. One editor was selling this as the preferred method of journalism.
“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. Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare — RARE — is the occasion when it’s wrapped into one person.”
Now comes the latest shift towards this Skynet level of reporting. At McClatchy News, they, too, have been making the move to less human-interest work and more assembly-line styles of journalism.
At The Wrap, they broke the story that the owner of 30 local newspapers, such as the Miami Herald and the Sacramento Bee, was moving its reporting processes to an internally created A.I. modeling program, dubbed their Content Scaling Agent (CSA). The program will be designed to serve two purposes: It can target the content of an article to different demographics or audiences, and — based on management hinting that this will aid in generating stories and “more inventory” — it can repurpose prior work for additional content.
Writer Corbin Bolies at The Wrap was able to get into the program and saw some of the ways it would be used. “You author the research draft,” the tool reads. “CSA helps format it for different audiences and platforms — each with the right tone, length, and structure.” This is just feeding core facts into a processor and having it burp out tailored articles based on where McClatchy will be submitting content.
More than this, the company wants the program to also produce a custom script for reporters to then use for video clips to be submitted elsewhere. So the computer will be telling the reporters what to say about their own reporting.
HOW IT WORKS – The content scaling agent, or CSA, allows newsroom editors to generate short- and long-form summaries of reporters’ stories; versions targeted at specific audiences; and video scripts for reporters to produce short-form content from their stories.
This type of food processor editing and generation has not been warmly greeted by reporters. In fact, the opposite can be said. Unions from three of the McClatchy papers — the Herald, Bee, and Kansas City Star — have already risen up in defiance. These unions filed grievances, as the last contract for their members had direct stipulations that no modernization of this type could be implemented without union involvement. Many reporters have already groused about having their names used on the mechanical articles.
Each union appears to have varying provisions for the workers to include their names. At the Miami Herald, bylines inform that they are AI-generated based on the work of named reporters. At the Sacramento Bee, the reporters called for their ability to have their names removed entirely from the prefab work done by the CSA. This leads to alerts that display like a product label, when you know that seeing more ingredients means a departure from natural content.
The result is a dose of overexplaining to readers that is distancing. Probably as an appeasement to the unions, McClatchy has AI-generated pieces filled with disclaimers. In one example from The Herald, we start with the combined “By Produced using AI, based on original work by Michelle Marchante,” byline. Next, we see a truncated dose of alleged journalism that is nothing more than a string of bullet-point entries. They provide a link to an actual article (FULL STORY, instructs the link), and it culminates with a clarification given as a coda.
This report was produced with the assistance of a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence and using our own originally reported, written and published content. It was reviewed and edited by our journalists.
Management is not thrilled with the resistance and has mentioned this in communications with staffers. Eric Nelson is McClatchy’s Vice President of Local News, and he essentially calls out those bristling at being subjugated by computers. “Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” Mr. Nelson said in the meeting. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind.” In another comment line, he pleaded for cooperation, for the sake of SEO traction. Nelson said using reporters’ bylines on the A.I.-generated articles would lend “authority”, leading to search engine rankings coming in higher.
While it is understandable that management will want to find ways to streamline and expand their reach with limited staff, the ultimate product dispersed cannot be considered better in quality. What they will be churning out is journalism that displays the difference between a sit-down meal created in a kitchen and something you get out of a vending machine after punching a few buttons.
As one guild representing the staff at a pair of Washington state papers wrote:
“Despite executives’ claims that the ‘CSA’ will save us, and that subscribers will continue paying for a product riddled with A.I.-generated repeats, we see it as nothing but a race to the bottom.”
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