How Media Unions Stabilize Technological Hype: Tracing organized journalism’s discursive constructions of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Amidst ongoing challenges to journalism’s economic models, labor markets, and technological practices, a new pressure has recently appeared in many newsrooms: the power of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) computational models and off-the-shelf interfaces to synthetically create content that passes for news. Seeing the phenomenon through the lens of this special issue’s focus on “hype,” this paper uses discourse analysis to understand how journalism unions define GenAI as a problem, articulate the value of journalism against it, and use collective bargaining to contractually shape its use in newsrooms. Motivated by scholarship detailing hype as popular communication, expectation setting, and technological stabilizing, we examine journalistic trade press, union statements, and collective bargaining agreements to offer a 6-dimensional image of GenAI hype and union-driven responses to it, and reflect on notable absences in media unions’ understanding of GenAI. We see this as a case of journalists articulating their roles and values in an all-too-common moment when they are challenged by sociotechnical forces that they did not create, but that they must nonetheless collectively navigate and reshape in service of the profession’s democratic mission.