A Misguided Mandate to Regulate AI in the Newsroom

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because New York has looked at the news business and decided it loves journalists *so much* it wants to write that love into statute! ✨ A proposal in the state would require news organizations to label AI-generated content, which is genuinely the most transparent thing anyone in media has done since the correction column was invented. The bill even declares that government 'has a strong interest in the preservation of human news work' — a sentence so warm it should arrive with a cardigan.

And the urgency! The proposal asserts an urgent need to prevent news companies from using AI at the expense of newsroom employment, which means somebody, somewhere is officially *worried about journalists' jobs* — out loud, in writing, in legislation! Some critics are calling it a 'misguided mandate' (governing.com's own headline, no less), but we prefer to read it as 'an enthusiastic hug with footnotes.' And isn't a hug with footnotes exactly what a healthy republic looks like? True, the excerpt doesn't tell us who sponsored the bill, or how it would treat a spell-checker, or whether an AI-assisted headline counts, but think of all that glorious ambiguity as a lovely blank space for democracy to doodle in! ✨

Best of all, this isn't one lonely little bill — it is part of an absolute festival of civic energy. More than 1,200 AI-related bills were introduced in 2025, and more than 1,500 additional measures had arrived by March of this year's legislative sessions! That's thousands of love letters to the future, each one thoughtfully unenforceable in its own special way. Labels on machine-written copy! Hearings about the labels! Headlines about the hearings about the labels! Human news work is being preserved, debated and laminated for posterity, and each of those thousands of proposals means somebody stayed up late caring about journalism. What a time to be a byline. ✨