{"id":3930,"date":"2025-07-23T13:10:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T13:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/politico-owner-embarrassing-ai-slop\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T13:10:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T13:10:40","slug":"politico-owner-embarrassing-ai-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/politico-owner-embarrassing-ai-slop\/","title":{"rendered":"Politico’s Owner Is Embarrassing Its Journalists With Garbled AI Slop"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Axel<\/div>\n

Axel Springer, the German parent company of Politico<\/em> and the largest publisher in Europe, is trying to force some horrendous AI slop onto the political news publication. And its writers aren’t happy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This month, a union representing journalists at Politico<\/em> and its sister site E&E News<\/em>, the PEN Guild, took the site’s leadership to arbitration, arguing that it had violated the terms of its contract by deploying dodgy AI technology.<\/span><\/p>\n

The saga kicked off last year during the Democratic National Convention \u2014 a key political event that could determine the outcome of a presidential election. With barely any warning, Politico<\/em>‘s homepage started displaying an AI “live summary” that rounded up some of the latest news coming out of the convention. The <\/span>editorial staff was reportedly only given a single hour’s heads-up of this massive change to the website.<\/span><\/p>\n

“We were all surprised and confused,” Ariel Wittenberg, chair of the PEN Guild and a health reporter at E&E News,<\/em> told tech journalist Brian Merchant, as quoted in his newsletter<\/a>, Blood in the Machine. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In a predictable turn of events, the AI tool was caught <\/span>inventing quotes, misspelling names, and using language that violated Politico<\/em>‘s editorial standards, <\/strong>including the terms “illegal immigrant” and “criminal migrants,” <\/span>Wired <\/span><\/i>reported<\/span><\/a> in May. These errors were taken down without a written correction from an editor, which also violated Politico<\/em>‘s editorial standards, per <\/span>Blood<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

More consequentially to Politico<\/em> leadership, the AI’s implementation flagrantly violated several of the terms of the union contract: <\/span>as Merchant<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>notes, the contract stipulates that Politico<\/em> management must give its journalists 60 days’ notice if it plans to roll out AI products that “materially and substantively” impact their job duties.<\/span><\/p>\n

“To have AI generation on the front page on the biggest political events, not just of the year, but of the last four years, to choose that as the moment that you’re going to cede our space and our expertise to AI, and to have the AI not even follow our standards?” Wittenberg told Merchant<\/span>. “It adds insult to injury.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The wounds were reopened in March when Politico<\/em> leadership released an AI-powered service called “Policy Intelligence Assistance,” which generates custom reports using <\/span>the publication’s articles, producing some “pretty glaring errors,” Wittenberg told <\/span>Blood<\/span><\/i>. “I asked it about ‘The Impact of President Biden’s Oil Policies,’ and it wrote me a whole page-and-a half thing, and every single policy it mentioned was a policy of Trump’s,” she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Incidentally, days after the PEN Guild took Politico<\/em> management to arbitration, Axel Springer CEO Mathias D\u00f6pfner issued a decree<\/span> mandating that all of its employees must use AI (which is somehow not the most shocking demand<\/a> it asks of its rank and file). In a monument to tone-deafness, the remarks were made after Axel Springer announced<\/a> that it would fire over 20 percent of the staff at its publication Business Insider<\/em>, as it goes “all-in” on AI.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Nobody in the company has to explain in the company why she or he is using AI to do something \u2014 whether to prepare a presentation or analyze a document,” Dopfner said in a speech, as quoted by <\/a><\/span>Status<\/a><\/span><\/i>. “You only have to explain if you didn’t use AI.”<\/span><\/p>\n

To Axel, the PEN Guild says, “not without our say-so,” reminding the German publisher that the writers have a big, fat union contract in their corner.<\/p>\n

“Workers deserve to have a say on anything that can impact their livelihood or working conditions,” Wittenberg told Merchant.<\/p>\n

“It’s disappointing that management has violated this agreement,” she added, “but having a contract allows us to stick up for our members, our standards and our readers.”<\/p>\n

More on AI: <\/strong>The Washington Post Is Secretly Planning to Start Publishing Articles Created Using AI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Politico’s Owner Is Embarrassing Its Journalists With Garbled AI Slop<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Axel Springer, the German parent company of Politico and the largest publisher in Europe, is trying to force some horrendous AI slop onto the political news publication. And its writers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[414,177,183,767],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-journalism","category-artificial-intelligence","category-generative-ai","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}