The NewsGuild of New York, which represents the editorial staff of USA Today’s commerce website Reviewed, is “taking collective action and demanding answers from management” after the website was accused of using AI to generate fake reviews of products for its site.
In a statement to TheWrap, a spokesperson for Reviewed denied the use of AI. “The Reviewed content referenced was created by third-party freelancers hired by a marketing agency partner, not AI. The pages were deployed without the accurate affiliate disclaimers and did not meet our editorial standards. Updates have been published,” the spokesperson said.
On Thursday, the union revealed that USA Today’s parent company Gannett reportedly worked with a “third-party marketing firm” to create the content.
“On Friday, our union learned that @reviewed mgmt had secretly contracted with a third party marketing firm to produce content and publish it on our site – work that would otherwise have been done by our staff, or by our digital marketers, before the bosses cut their department,” They tweeted, apparently meaning that the matter was discovered on Oct. 20.
“Since we discovered this attempt to undermine our union’s strength, we’ve been fighting back: taking collective action and demanding answers from management,” the union added with a link to a Washington Post report about the matter.
The union continued, “Whether it’s Gannett or Politico, the bosses’ goals for AI are the same: squeeze out profits by replacing workers and exploiting those who remain. They’re attacking the entire working class, and, like the @penguild , we are fighting back.”
“We’ve built our union as a fighting organization, because we know that when we fight, we win. Since Monday, rather than meet our demands (or meet with us *at all*, which they’ve been scared to do since our union went public in December!) they doubled down.”
“We know that left to its own devices, @Gannett will put profit over workers’ rights or journalistic integrity, so we’re organized to fight back against this attack on unions and the public trust. If AI increases productivity, we demand a fair share, not threats to our jobs,” the union concluded.
On Thursday, Gannett denied the accusations that several recently published reviews on Reviewed were written by AI, but said that the third-party content “did not meet our editorial standards.”
Employees first noticed the third-party content last week. Union members noted the purported authors of the content were not on staff and attempted to look them up online, with some concluding that the authors might not exist at all.
The accusations come as the union is negotiating with Gannett for a new contract and, as the union put it, a “struggle against the unilateral austerity measures being imposed by Mike Reed and Gannett leadership which are impacting shops like ours around the country.”
USA Today purchased the consumer product review site in 2011.
See the statements from the union below.
