Anti-Waymo campaign relied on op-eds written with AI
They’ve been waging a kitchen sink campaign, placing op-eds in local news outlets arguing the autonomous taxi company Waymo could cost jobs, endanger riders, deprive the government of information, and block fire trucks.
Key points
- Waymo operates commercially in 15 US cities, but has faced opposition from labor unions, ride-hailing giants such as Uber and Lyft, and various AI-skeptical groups and pedestrian safety….
- The AI detection service Pangram found that many of the pieces were written with a significant amount of AI input, but none contain labels disclosing AI use.
- “Limited use of AI for research or polishing doesn’t automatically disqualify a submission, but we don’t accept pieces generated entirely by AI,” Dallas Morning News commentary editor Ryan Sanders said in an email.
The Washington Post reported this month that the Coalition for Accountability and Road Safety, a group of Waymo opponents, spent more than $2.6 million on ads in the DC area in 2026, a greater sum than the winning mayoral candidate spent in the same year.
Additional details
- Andrew Julien, executive editor at the Daily News, said in an email the organization aims to create stricter guardrails against AI on the site, given the publication’s ongoing litigation against Microsoft and OpenAI.
- “Like many, many writers, I use AI tools for research, to sometimes test my arguments, help organize my thinking, and make my writing as clear as possible.
- Chronicle editor Matt Fleischer told Semafor that the news organization’s policies were to ask opinion writers to disclose whether they had used AI.
- “A first draft of this OpEd was prepared by our PR firm at the time, which is standard procedure when working with a PR firm.
- The News Opponents of AI-powered cars have been using artificial intelligence to get their message out in the news media.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.