Unionized employees of The Philadelphia Inquirer have overwhelmingly approved a new three-year contract that includes new guardrails governing the newspaper’s use of artificial intelligence, the newspaper reported today.
The agreement, ratified 156-4, prohibits the Inquirer from using realistic AI-generated images or videos for editorial purposes and bars the newspaper from using artificial intelligence to mimic employees without their consent. Employees can also remove their bylines from AI-generated content.
Guild members must be involved in developing, training and maintaining AI tools and in creating or verifying AI-generated content. The contract also establishes a joint AI Advisory Committee that will meet monthly to review the newspaper’s use of the technology.
The deal includes raises and bonuses, including a $5,577 payment within 30 days, a 4% raise and $1,000 bonus in the second year, and raises of between 2.25% and 4% in the third year.
It comes as the Inquirer faces a $100 million lawsuit from New Jersey Democratic powerbroker George E. Norcross III over the Inkygate controversy.
Norcross sued the newspaper and editor Nancy Phillips last month, alleging that Phillips fabricated or distorted information that helped fuel the state’s now-dismissed racketeering prosecution against him.
At the center of the controversy are ten pages of confidential notes from Phillips’ 2019 off-the-record interview with Susan Bass Levin that ultimately wound up in the files of state prosecutors.
The Inquirer has acknowledged that the notes reached prosecutors but says neither Phillips nor the newspaper provided them directly to the Attorney General’s Office. The newspaper has said it does not know how prosecutors obtained them.