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 AI to synthetically create content that passes for news. 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.

If the ways that journalists work and the stories that they tell always depend upon an era’s technologies, then what kind of news emerges from a press that relies on Generative AI? How is this press actually a “synthetic press” that uses machine learning to create its words, images, and videos—and to shape its workflows, economics, ethics, intellectual property, and sense of public purpose? Envisioned as the first in a series of investigations, this project teases out early dynamics of a field in transition. By analyzing discourses, policies, and practices defining this journalistic moment, we see a “synthetic press” emerging that is likely to continue shifting for years to come.

As with previous hype cycles of technological innovation, disruption, and adaptation, Generative AI is provoking existential questions about the value of journalism—and coinciding with waves of unionization among journalists in the United States. In a new article for Digital Journalism, we show how news media unions that represent and advocate for a growing number of journalists are trying to manage and stabilize Generative AI’s hype. Based on a close study of nearly 50 union sources over a two-year period from 2022 to 2024, we find six areas where news media unions are focusing their Generative AI attention and concern—and, notably, two areas where they’re not. Though these patterns reflect a snapshot in time, they serve as touchstones that scholars and practitioners alike might use to convene journalists, publishers, technologies, infrastructures, and audiences in ways that lead to better media systems.

Generative AI poses the biggest threat to press freedom in decades, and journalists should act quickly to organize themselves and radically reshape its power to produce news. Long buffeted by economic and technological challenges beyond its control, today’s press depends on distributed, technological infrastructures owned and operated by a select few powerful corporations. With Generative AI, news organizations may soon outsource to tech companies not only the power and responsibility to disseminate and curate news, but to create it in the first place.