The Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees (IAPE), Local 1096 of The News-Guild-CWA, issued the following statement after it was disclosed an column with the byline of a hedge fund manager was written by artificial intelligence:
WSJ Opinion staff and contributors are not represented by our union. And they appear to have different standards for content.
Yesterday, IAPE members were as surprised as our readers to learn that a WSJ Opinion piece published Monday afternoon under the name of Stanley F. Druckenmiller was actually written using artificial intelligence. Two days later, the Journal still has not labeled Druckenmiller’s column as AI-generated content, even though editorial page editor Paul Gigot has publicly justified this use of AI as “a fact of modern life.”
Meanwhile, Druckenmiller defends the AI platform’s work: “I don’t know why this is relevant. My name is on the piece. It’s my message.”
Is it?
In our News pages, bylines have meaning. That’s why this union has been fighting for more than a year to reverse an arbitrary WSJ policy change restricting bylines on stories. We believe our readers deserve to know exactly who – and what – has authored and contributed reporting to the stories they pay for. There should be no question whether any WSJ News item has been fully reported and undergone the Journal’s famously rigorous editing process, all by human hands.
IAPE is disappointed by the WSJ Opinion section’s willingness to publish AI-generated content in its Pulitzer Prize-winning pages. WSJ readers deserve better, and our members deserve to have their good work published each day without the taint of Opinion’s AI causing some to wonder whether standards might change on the News side.
Throughout The NewsGuild, unions have been fighting for protections against AI content replacing their members’ work. IAPE intends to negotiate the same in our next contract to protect our jobs, our trust with readers, and the quality, human-authored content the Journal is known for.
