{"id":12103,"date":"2026-04-22T10:23:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/12103\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T10:23:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:23:15","slug":"a-newspaper-is-allegedly-slapping-humans-names-on-ai-stories-without-their-permission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/12103\/","title":{"rendered":"A Newspaper Is Allegedly Slapping Humans’ Names on AI Stories Without Their Permission"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re reading a blog post by Mike Pearl based on a news report about AI-generated news articles by Corbin Bolies of TheWrap<\/a>. While my hyperlink to his work is obligatory and standard, if Bolies is like most writers, it would probably irk him a great deal if the byline of this article said \u201cReporting by Corbin Bolies with Mike Pearl\u2019s assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

And if I were not a human blogger, but a piece of AI software, would that be better or worse?<\/p>\n

According to Bolies and TheWrap, a new piece of Claude-based AI tech is getting rolled out in the newsrooms of the McClatchy Media family of newspapers, and some journalists are being forced to take partial bylines, even when an AI system \u201cwrote\u201d their article.<\/p>\n

The tool, called the content scaling agent (CSA) enables editors to create summaries of varying length for any story. I\u2019m imagining the idea of \u201cscaling\u201d a jpeg larger or smaller, but applied to a piece of text. But the CSA can also create, to quote TheWrap, \u201cversions targeted at specific audiences.\u201d TheWrap says page of internal information reviewed by Boiles calls it \u201ca writing partner that handles the mechanical work of content adaptation so journalists can focus on what matters: judgment, voice and storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

TheWrap links to an example: a piece in Pennsylvania\u2019s Centre Daily Times, credited with the following format: \u201cReporting by [author redacted]. Produced with AI assistance.\u201d The AI-generated article is two short paragraphs of prose, followed by the heading \u201cHere are the highlights\u201d and then five bullet points. There\u2019s a link in the middle of the article to the full, human-written story, and it\u2019s just shy of 1,200 words long and contains six data-heavy graphics.<\/p>\n

According to TheWrap, the Centre Daily Times is non-union. The Sacramento Bee, TheWrap says, is a unionized publication, and omits the author entirely. Its byline format reads \u201cEdited by [editor redacted]. Story produced with AI assistance.\u201d The unionized Miami Herald\u2019s CSA bylines use the format \u201cproduced using AI based on original work by [author redacted],\u201d which uses the author\u2019s name, but doesn\u2019t sound like they sought \u201cAI assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a McLatchy staff meeting quoted by TheWrap, the company\u2019s chief of staff for local news, Kathy Vetter, reportedly responded to one question by saying \u201cIf they don\u2019t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we\u2019re going to use their name.\u201d<\/p>\n

TheWrap says last week, grievances filed by the unions at the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star allege that McClatchy\u2019s CSA was rolled out in violation of contract provisions saying the unions must be notified before \u201cmajor technological change.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClatchy did not return a request for comment on Tuesday evening. We will update this article if we receive one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019re reading a blog post by Mike Pearl based on a news report about AI-generated news articles by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,182,1133],"class_list":{"0":"post-12103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-claude","11":"tag-journalism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}