The Guardian has been accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) to help strike-breakers produce stories during recent walkouts.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said it was “deeply disturbed” to discover that AI had been deployed to assist working staff during last month’s strikes.
The Guardian offered non-striking staff AI to help generate headlines for stories, though the tools do not generate the main body of text.
Journalists accused Guardian bosses of attempting to derail the four-day industrial action, which was held in protest against the controversial sale of its sister title The Observer to Tortoise, a loss-making start-up.
One insider said: “Using AI tools to improve the productivity of managers covering [the] work of journalists who were out on strike was a deeply cynical attempt by management to undermine the strike. It’s also in contravention of The Guardian’s self-professed values.”
People aren’t even allowed to try and work around a strike now?
They realise the AI, as it’s been trained via their previous work, is better than they are. Panic!
“It’s also in contravention of The Guardian’s self-professed values.”
You mean they don’t actually value dull predictable robotic writing?
“It’s ok for us to interfere with your right to manage the business but you’re bastards for coping without us.” The entitlement! The folly!
Did they ask Elon what he thinks about it all?
Copy articles from other lefty papers like Le Monde or the NY Times, use the AI to translate them into Guardian English, and publish. Job done.
Guardian journalists needed AI help to write headlines? Strewth! Says something about Guardian journalists.
@Andrew M
Do you not suspect that’s what they’ve been doing? Why they needed the help with the headlines? They’d neither read them nor understood them.
“deeply disturbed”
Being journalists, couldn’t they come up with more compelling words? Shouldn’t they be “alarmed?” How about a “warning?”
A Union being against measures to derail their antics… Who’da thunk it….
But, as good Lefties, I thought the Workers ran the Guardian. So how can The Workers complain about actions of The Workers.
The interesting question is whether the quality went up or down. genAI produces utter derivative crap, so a comparison with the usual Grauniad output is completely fair.
Come on jgh… You’re talking about Guardian employees..
The average Leftie is already capable of firmly believing in two mutually exclusive things existing at the same time.
To be employed at the Guardian you must be able to do that flawlessly for at least 3 cases simultaneously, at all times.
And obviously the ones still doing stuff at the time were not the right kind of Workers, and Betrayers of the Great Cause, while the ones still working considered the strikers to be Betrayers of the Great Cause of Bringing the Narrative to the People, and thus the wrong kind of Worker, with sympathy and proper respect for their and their Union’s Worker’s Plight, but still…
Standard Socialist mental gymnastics.
All together now:
If the Guardian didn’t have Artificial Intelligence it wouldn’t have any intelligence at all.
@Gamecock
I dunno, “deeply disturbed” seem to describe Guardian journalists quite accurately.
Would anyone be able to tell the difference between Guardian content written by an AI and their staff?
I’m not sure that AI is capable of being quite as snide as “Marina Hyde”, or quite as batshit as any of the melanin-enriched “writers”.
Could it be possible for AI to be as predictable as a John Crace article?
“It’s also in contravention of The Guardian’s self-professed values.”
Especially the one of not using any intelligence while writing!
“a deeply cynical attempt by management to undermine the strike”
Ahem…. “you don’t get to choose how we resist”
Make your opponents live up to their own rules….