Associated Press Staffers Fight ‘AI Transition’ Plans As AP Execs Throw Shade At The Maine Wire

The union representing Associated Press staffers pushed back Tuesday over job losses related to the news company’s AI plans.

“AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence – ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP news stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists,” the News Media Guild said in a statement.

“Just last week,” a guild spokesman said, “the AP ignored a union request to bargain over artificial intelligence, after it told staffers it was planning to make big changes.”

The union is pushing back against the news company’s publicized plan to phase out its traditional focus on newspapers.

AP’s top executive earlier this week was quoted in a wire story laying out plans for employee buyouts.

The AP’s own story described the reduction in force as “part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s.

“The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets,” the story said. “Once the lion’s share of AP’s revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10 percent of its income.”

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, said.

Despite Pace talking specifically about “companies investing in artificial intelligence,” AP’s “media relations manager” complained Tuesday about The Maine Wire’s headline Monday referring to the company’s moving towards AI.

“The headline suggests that these changes are tied to a transition to artificial intelligence,” Nicole Meir wrote The Maine Wire. “That characterization is inaccurate. The staff announcement makes no mention of AI, and the changes are not related to AI initiatives.”

Meir’s bosses apparently didn’t read their own staffer’s  story Monday in which Pace was directly quoted by an AP reporter as making AI plans.

The story was written by no less than an AP reporter who wrote that the News Media Guild “had no immediate comment on the plan.”

The guild shortly thereafter tweeted a statement blasting the company’s AI plans ahead of Meir emailing The Maine Wire complaining about a headline that actually was spot-on correct.

The guild said that amid the company “flirting” with transitioning from human intelligence to artificial intelligence, it has “failed to provide staff with a coherent vision of where it is headed and who its customers are.

“Instead it appears to be flailing and desperate, chasing trends that soon disappear,” the guild said, referring partly to AI.