I find this to be incredibly short-sighted. However, it does say it was a part of a union contract, so that explains some of it (the part where it seems to come entirely from a fear of job security).

Even if you want to keep AI out of the content-writing part, or the image generation part of your product, there are still areas where a newsroom can do much more ambitious work with the same people:

- AI can do research to assist in fact checking of articles

- AI can help suggest story ideas based on patterns it found in your own articles over time (an editor would still curate them)

- AI can help the newsroom pore over more first-hand sources/raw sources. Think of how many times you've had to process a stack of hard to OCR PDFs that come out of a FOIA, for example, or poring over government datasets when trying to make sense of something. Or a person's historical tweets, etc.

So it's clear that whoever won in this debate (hopefully there was at least a proper debate) wasn't interested in talking about all these additional areas where AI can help the existing people do more _without risking their jobs_.