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In summer 2023, Hollywood writers and actors attracted international news coverage during a strike over entertainment media's use of artificial intelligence (AI).One of the striking unions, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), struck for 148 days to secure a Minimum Basic Agreement that provides worker protections for the use of AI in the film, television, and streaming media industries.Yet, the future of media labor and union collective action over the use of AI extends beyond Hollywood.Between April 2015 and June 2021, more than 7,500 journalism workers unionized in the United States at over 200 internet-only, publishing, and broadcast media companies (see my 2023 article in Media, Culture & Society "Happiness in Newsroom Contracts: Communicative Resistance for Digital Work and Life Satisfaction").Since 2023, journalism workers have continued to unionize partially due to the use of AI and other new technologies in newsrooms.In May 2023, for example, workers at CNET, an online news and technology site, announced that they joined the WGA East (WGAE) partly because a "union would give us a voice on new AI and marketing initiatives," according to their "Why We're Organizing" statement.Similarly, workers at IGN, an online video game and entertainment journalism site, announced their unionization with The News Guild (TNG) in February 2024, writing in their Mission Statement that they need "protections against generative AI and similar technologies."The integration of AI into media workplaces has the potential to dramatically reshape working conditions, editorial processes, and power dynamics in journalism.Union responses to these changes will play a vital role in determining how journalism workers navigate new technologies and labor practices, impacting the future of journalism and industry dynamics.This commentary explores how media unions have navigated the use of AI in journalism, going beyond their initial reasons for organizing and first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) priorities.Unions' responses to technological changes have a long history.Already in 1966, TNG members at Canada's Oshawa Times went on strike and won meaningful union and job security protection over the introduction of automation, as I note in a 2018 Journalism Studies article, "Temporary Labor Convergence: Newsworkers Mobilize Massive Community Support to Organize the Newspaper Chain, 1963Chain, -1966."Karin Assmann's monograph assesses the effect of unionization and guild membership on digital news work, working conditions, and culture, going beyond why they organized and their initial CBA priorities.Assmann
Errol Salamon (Mon,) studied this question.