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Several dozen editorial workers at Business Insider who are unionized with the NewsGuild of New York held a lunchtime rally Thursday to protest management’s adoption of artificial intelligence tools to produce news stories. Just before workers held their rally, Jamie Heller, the editor-in-chief of Business Insider, told staff in a memo that the online news website begin using a custom AI language model to “help publish quick news stories.”
Heller wrote that the company had trained the AI “to use only stories we select from our archive, along wiht a piece of news, to create a story written in our style and built from our own coverage.” The stories will be edited by a human and clearly disclosed that they are written by AI, she said.
But Alex Nicoll, a union shop steward in the Insider Union and reporter covering the private equity industry for Business Insider, said that those editors will be non-union, and added that the use of AI and other “labor-stealing technology” is a violation of the union’s contract.
“Having a systematic bot doing this and writing 60 stories a week is obviously a violation of our contract but on top of that and more importantly I think it’s a violation of our readers and their trust and it’s a violation of all of us,” Nicoll said. “People are feeling very threatened by the rollout of all of this, and they're really uncomfortable with the company doing this and they're fired up to fight it."
Earlier this year, Business Insider management laid off 26 percent of their unionized employees at the same time that the CEO Axel Springer, Business Insider’s parent company, promised to increase its usage of AI. Nicoll said this was a "pretty tone-deaf combination" and called this week’s rollout of AI news content the “tip of the spear” that the union will do everything in its power to push back on.
“Management’s goal is profit, not excellence, and their willingness to publish AI-generated slop, instead of people-powered journalism, is a clear example of exactly that,” SusanDeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York said in a statement. “BI readers deserve news they can trust and that comes from our members.”
Workers block AI elsewhere
Earlier this week, the NewsGuild announced that it had one of its biggest wins yet at blocking the use of AI in the workplace. A federal arbitrator ruled on Nov. 26 that management at the political news site Politico and one of its subsidiaries E & E News violated its employees’ collective bargaining agreement when it launched two AI tools in 2024.
The union argued that management did not give its employees proper notice that it was rolling out AI products. Their contract requires that management give 60-day notice for the rollout of any new AI product and the arbitrator largely agreed with the union’s position.
“If the goal is speed and the cost is accuracy and accountability, AI is the clear winner,” the arbitrator wrote in the ruling. “If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output, which are accuracy and reliability.”
The union touted the arbitration results as one of the first major decisions affecting newsrooms’ use of AI and protecting workers’ rights.
“This decision makes it clear that unionized journalists are the ones fighting for accurate news when companies roll out AI spreading misinformation,” NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss said in a statement. “By unionizing and demanding quality for their readers, [journalists] are negotiating stronger ethics, accountability and actual humans producing the news. This ruling is a strong message to every media boss: AI must be implemented responsibly, transparently and through negotiation with journalists.”
Politico, like Business Insider, is owned by Axel Springer. A spokesperson for the German publishing giant did not respond to a request for comment on the Politico arbitration ruling or the Business Insider walkout.
Unlike the workers at Politico, editorial employees at Business Insider don’t have a specific provision in their contract regarding AI, said Nicoll, which workers signed in January 2023 after a 13-day strike. It was the longest-ever work stoppage for a digital media union.
The 144 unionized Business Insider employees plan to start negotiating their successor contract in the next few months. Nicoll said that he and his coworkers were excited by the Politico decision because it “shows that there are ways to beat the bosses.”
“It feels like all of the biggest players in our economy are just all in on AI and it kind of feels like an inevitability that the bosses are gonna get to decide what that looks like,” he said. “But there's ways to protect our workers from AI and there's ways to formally hold them to account for violating our contract.”
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