From the Northwest Labor Press:
"Tacoma News Tribune reporter Kristine Sherred couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A coworker wrote about a local man who takes his golden retriever with him in a motorcycle sidecar. A few weeks later she saw the article republished. This time, the writing was choppy and charmless, stripped of her colleague’s voice … and his byline. Something was off.
"Sherred sent the link to her union-represented co-workers. They would eventually find out that their employer McClatchy Media had fed the article into a new AI (artificial intelligence) tool it calls the Content Scaling Agent. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, it’s designed to rewrite and repackage articles for different lengths, formats, and audiences. Now the feature story about the sidecar dog could have been written by anyone. It wasn’t journalism any more; it was 'content.'”
"AI’s rapid rollout is creating similar situations for millions of workers. But like Sherred, some of those workers have a union, giving them a chance to unite and defend themselves. Sherred’s union, the NewsGuild, made AI policy a centerpiece of her union contract campaign. And across the United States, unions are responding to the threat of AI by pushing for contract language that protects workers’ autonomy and job security."
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