{"id":284496,"date":"2026-04-24T22:41:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T22:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/284496\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T22:41:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T22:41:42","slug":"the-sacramento-bees-use-of-ai-leads-to-protest-amongst-reporters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/284496\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sacramento Bee\u2019s use of AI leads to protest amongst reporters"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 30 of the 40 journalists at the Sacramento Bee are taking a stance on the use of generative artificial intelligence and its use in generating news content.<\/p>\n

Reporters in the Sacramento Bee News Guild, a union of The Sacramento Bee\u2019s reporters, have been withholding their bylines from stories generated by their new Content Scaling Agent, or CSA, that\u2019s powered by artificial intelligence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new tool, developed by the Bee\u2019s parent company McClatchy Media, is designed to increase the volume of content the Bee produces, according to the Sac Bee News Guild\u2019s Vice Chair, Ariane Lange.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo if you wrote a story where the headline was about, for example, a change in the Sacramento City Unified School District, it might generate a slightly different version of the story, where the headline and the angle was directed more towards an audience of parents,\u201d Lange said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lange has been working as an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee since 2021.\u00a0 She said that while she may gear stories toward specific audiences, she doesn\u2019t feel comfortable with an AI tool taking her story and generating articles where that angle is shifted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s something icky about taking a story that\u2019s already published, potentially, and making a watered-down version geared toward gaining clicks from a specific audience,\u201d Lange said. \u201cIt feels a little exploitative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stories generated by AI have been published in the Bee, but they are marked as such, saying they were based on original work by a reporter. Lange said that they want to use the bylines of reporters to boost the CSA\u2019s credibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey know the public trusts the reporters,\u201d Lange said. \u201cThey\u2019re banking on using our credibility as reporters to shore up the credibility of this AI tool that reporters of the Sacramento Bee do not believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every news story, including generated ones, needs to be edited by human editors as is required by the Bee\u2019s AI policy.<\/p>\n

Lange said that one of the Guild\u2019s biggest concerns is the quality of the whole paper, not just AI generated content. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to affect the quality of the stories we care most about, because our editors will be even more swamped than they are now, because they\u2019ll be dealing with these new AI generated stories,\u201d Lange said. \u201cWe know that this initiative places quantity over quality, and in fact, prioritizes quantity to the detriment of quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lange said that the tool is \u201csandboxed,\u201d meaning it\u2019s not supposed to pull from content outside of the URL of the story it’s given. Chris Fusco, the Executive Editor at the Sacramento Bee, declined to comment on how the tool was built, outside of what\u2019s stated in their AI policy.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\""TheThe headline of a recent Sacramento Bee story that was created using generative AI and edited by a Sacramento Bee editor. There is no reporter byline.Screenshot of Sacramento Bee website<\/p>\n

\u201cOur policy states that we don\u2019t mislead readers, and we have built that transparency into our use of bots and other automated technology in our reporting and in our products,\u201d the policy reads.<\/p>\n

While the policy doesn\u2019t state how these tools were built or trained, it states that they collaborated with technologists to set parameters for story templates.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor those familiar with the ability of certain AI to \u201challucinate,\u201d or make up facts, rest assured: Our automated content does not use that type of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

When using generative AI, especially with large language models, they can produce responses to queries that are stated as if they\u2019re fact, in order to fulfill the prompt given when there are gaps in source information.<\/p>\n

While McClatchy\u2019s model might not hallucinate, Lange said that in the early stages of its rollout, it has already made mistakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe already know that it does generate errors, which we know because reporters have already been strong-armed into editing stories based on their work,\u201d Lange said. \u201cMy understanding is that it wouldn\u2019t hallucinate as much as say, a ChatGPT, which is pulling information from the wide open internet. But it\u2019s not a person, and it doesn\u2019t know fact from fiction.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

McClatchy Media did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

AI and journalism: the ethics of generation<\/p>\n

CalMatters has been developing its AI tools for journalism for over a decade. Their project Digital Democracy<\/a> helps track bills and the legislative bodies they move through.<\/p>\n

According to Neil Chase, the CEO of CalMatters, they\u2019ve used AI to cover things no journalist is paying attention to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are generative AI tools being used to create, you know, massive amounts of disinformation, which is terrible for journalism. There are also uses of generative AI to create journalism that otherwise wouldn\u2019t exist,\u201d Chase said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing at CalMatters specifically is we\u2019re not using generative AI, but AI tools that we\u2019ve created to go through data about the state legislature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chase said they use Digital Democracy to comb through data and look for story ideas: inconsistencies, different kinds of behaviors. The things that journalists might see in person covering the Capitol.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe find those things and we call them tips. They are ideas like a scribble in a reporter\u2019s notebook that they want to follow up on later,\u201d Chase said. \u201cWe give those to reporters all over the state, not just at CalMatters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chase said that CalMatters doesn\u2019t generate any of their articles and that’s mostly due to the kind of in-depth reporting that CalMatters does. Especially when resources are limited, AI can help reporters cover things they otherwise wouldn\u2019t be able to. He gave an example of small-town newsrooms building a tool to help monitor police scanners and tell them if something important happened that they missed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat seems like a useful tool,\u201d Chase said. \u201cVery different from publishing something final that is going to determine whether your audience trusts you or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chase said he can see a future for AI in journalism, and that he\u2019s been astounded by the progress AI has made in recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we can just blindly use these tools,\u201d Chase said. \u201cBut I also don\u2019t think we can sit here and say, well, AI could never make an ethical decision or AI will never be able to do this or never able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But right now, according to Djordje Padejski, a professor who teaches about AI and journalism at Stanford and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, the technology just isn\u2019t there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCan AI make ethical decisions that could be applied in journalism? My short answer is really no,\u201d Padejski said. \u201cNot in the way [that] journalism requires.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Padejski, language models are designed to calculate the statistically most probable next word in a sentence, and while this can make the model seem realistic and accurate, that\u2019s not always the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey optimize for probability, they optimize for coherence, for pattern recognition,\u201d Padejski said. \u201cThey don\u2019t optimize for truth. They\u2019re not designed to understand harms or public interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that the threshold for AI accuracy rates is just not on par with what\u2019s required for good journalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor computer sciences, accuracy rate over 80% is a fascinating, celebrated achievement,\u201d Padejski said. \u201cJournalism does not tolerate 80% accuracy \u2026 Journalism is a verification-based, evidence-based, document-based profession. AI systems have a statistical-pattern-based, synthetic approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Padejski said that even when humans write summarizations of other reporters’ stories, important points can get distorted or misinterpreted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Lange\u2019s work, this is one of the most concerning problems she\u2019d have to contend with if she had to use the Bee\u2019s content scaling agent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the Bee, she\u2019s an investigative reporter covering traffic deaths. Since 2024, she\u2019s covered and documented every single person who has died in traffic collisions on city streets.<\/p>\n

When these deaths happen, she\u2019s often a stranger talking to people on the worst day of their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will do my best to honor their loved one\u2019s life and to make sure that public officials are held to account for not doing more to prevent traffic deaths,\u201d Lange said. \u201cBut my employer might feed that story to a chat bot. That\u2019s revolting.\u201d<\/p>\n


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