The Scoop
One of The Associated Press’ leaders on AI had a blunt message for the publication’s staff: Resistance to AI is “futile.”
Last month, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editor wrote that a recent job applicant withdrew from consideration for a reporting fellowship after discovering the position included filing notes to an AI writing tool instead of actually writing stories, touching off a heated debate in media circles.
One AP higher-up crystallized many media managers’ views on the debate: “Because local newsrooms are so strapped, they are turning for assistance on the news making process in every direction. Advance Publications got there first, others will follow,” AP Senior Product Manager for AI Aimee Rinehart wrote in internal company Slack messages first shared with Semafor, referring to the Plain Dealer’s parent company. “Resistance is futile.”
Rinehart, who oversees the wire service’s AI initiatives, suggested that in the future, reporters could go to events, get quotes, plug them into a large language model, and have the model generate a story, saving them time on writing stories they don’t feel passionately about. She also noted 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. Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare — RARE — is the occasion when it’s wrapped into one person,” she wrote.
Rinehart’s comments alarmed some AP journalists.
One AP reporter said in a message that the “dismissiveness and disdain some of you have shown for human writing are insulting and abhorrent. Strong reporting and clear writing are the lifeblood of journalism, not AI-written slop. AI may be inevitable, 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.”
“This internal discussion among staffers from different departments doesn’t reflect the overall position of the AP regarding the use of AI,” the AP told Semafor in a statement. “We’ve been an industry leader in setting AI standards that safeguard the vital role of journalists, while also allowing for AI use for things like language translation, summarizations, transcriptions and content tagging.”
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Max’s view
The tensions inside the AP — and Rinehart’s articulation of a case many managers believe but are reluctant to make — reveal a broader conflict playing out across the media over how AI should be applied within journalism, a costly craft filled with strong-willed individuals.
Many (though notably not all) media companies have cut deals with AI giants to license their content, arguing that they would rather be compensated for their work than let it be scraped for free, and want to provide the models with quality information rather than digital garbage.
Within newsrooms themselves, media companies are rushing to adopt tools many of their employees are wary of using.
Most rank-and-file journalists, like many other white-collar workers, view AI tools with deep suspicion and see their adoption as potential (or inevitable) threat to their livelihoods.
Among newsroom and media leaders, the feeling is friendlier.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner told me onstage last week at Semafor’s Trust in Media event that he was confident in the media business “because of the opportunities that AI can provide.”
In private, he’s been more direct. In a series of recent meetings with staff from Business Insider and Politico shared with Semafor, Döpfner has repeatedly emphasized that news organizations that do not embrace artificial intelligence will almost certainly be left behind and fail.
For the moment, news media seems more insulated than other professions from some of the threats of AI. Journalists spend years developing contacts and sources for information that can’t be gleaned or acquired in any other way than trust between two individuals.
Rinehart’s vision for AI tools is commonly held among some of her peer set, but seems to focus on the thorniest and, for the moment, least useful AI applications.
Many media companies have already developed fairly uncontroversial AI applications that have been broadly embraced precisely because they help journalists do what they can’t do at the moment.
In 2024, Semafor experimented with a partnership with Microsoft on a news aggregator called Signals, which helped find stories written in non-English languages not easily picked up by English searches. Earlier this year, Nieman Lab reported that The New York Times had built an AI podcast summarizer for its staff to better monitor the massive volume of content created every day across that fragmented ecosystem. Organizations like the Times and The New Yorker offer audio versions of originally reported stories narrated by AI. Transcription services have already made a formerly tedious process instantaneous, allowing reporters to process more information and get stories out quicker.
These tools are additive, and while they have the same potential for hiccups that other LLMs do, they are helpful at allowing journalists to access more and different information than was available before. Media companies are better off thinking of ways to capitalize on what AI already does well, particularly mass summarization, research, and visualization, rather than “helping” a few proud writers save a few minutes on their copy.
Room for Disagreement
AI poses another, more existential threat to journalists’ jobs, Charlotte Klein wrote in New York Magazine: By destroying traffic-based business models, and creating a “traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old.”
Notable
- The push into AI also comes at a time when the AP is looking to modernize its revenue streams as many of its traditional clients — local news organizations — shrink. Earlier this week, the AP announced it was partnering with the prediction market Kalshi to provide its vote count data and race calls for national and major state elections.