A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organisations to slap disclaimers on AI-generated material and make humans review it before anything goes live.
Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act, or the NY FAIR News Act.
Rozic said: “At the centre of the news industry, New York has a strong interest in preserving journalism and protecting the workers who produce it.”
A closer read shows rules aimed at AI transparency for readers and inside newsrooms. The law would demand disclaimers on any published content that is “substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence.”
AI labels have already become a bunfight in the industry, with critics claiming disclaimers spook audiences even when generative AI is just a helper. The bill includes a carve-out allowing copyrightable material to be excluded, a nod to how the US Copyright Office treats AI-only work as ineligible while allowing leeway for “human authorship”.
It requires news organisations to tell journalists and other media professionals when AI is being used and how. Any news content created using generative AI must be reviewed by a human employee “with editorial control” before publication, covering articles, audio, images and other visuals.
There is language requiring safeguards to protect confidential material, primarily source information, from AI access.
Lawmakers pushed two main arguments for the NY FAIR News Act: AI-generated content can be “false or misleading”, and it “plagiarises” by pulling from original sources “without permission or proper citation.”
Fahy said: “Perhaps one of the industries at most risk from the use of artificial intelligence is journalism, and as a result, the public’s trust and confidence in accurate news reporting. More than 76 per cent of Americans are concerned about AI stealing or reproducing journalism and local news stories.”
NewsGuild of New York spokesperson Jennifer Sheehan confirmed the union has been meeting with the labour coalition to line up concerns around AI adoption and to get the bill moving.
The bill would also lock in labour protections, including restrictions on firing journalists or cutting their work, pay, or benefits because a generative model appeared. Similar language has been appearing in individual newsroom union contracts around the country over the past couple of years.
In December, the NewsGuild launched a nationwide campaign called “News Not Slop” to push for more guardrails on AI in newsrooms. In New York City, the Business Insider union rallied in the Financial District against an editorial pilot publishing AI-generated stories with an “AI byline.”
Sheehan said: “Our union is deeply concerned about media companies implementing artificial intelligence in ways that damage the credibility of our members’ journalism,” and warned about “the impact such technology has had and will have on jobs.”
