What a model may draft — and what a human still has to sign

The five-person board is being built in a newsroom that already bargains over machines. If the principles ignore that, they will be principles about a shop that no longer exists.

CBS News’s 2026–2029 WGA text, in the 24/7 unit, is blunt. The company may require employees to use generative-AI systems and their output. If a staffer employed as of 6 April 2026 is laid off because the company used gen AI to generate news material, the multiplier on severance is 1.5 times, through 9 March 2029. Disputes go to the ordinary grievance path. That is labor language about tools. It is not an ethics ruling about whether a model can own a lede.

An independence board that only talks about “fairness” and never talks about who signed the machine’s draft will miss the new cut. The cut is no longer only an executive producer. It is a system prompt plus a human who is tired.

What this desk will treat as the line, including on this site:

• A model may sort, transcribe, compare, and check dates.
• A human owns the finding and the lede.
• If a network airs model text as if a reporter stood it up, that is a principles case — accuracy and disclosure — not only a staffing case.

What the five would have to add to any code they steal from Day 7:

• Disclose when a model drafted a passage that airs.
• Do not let the owner’s AI vendor sit in the same chair as standards.
• A layoff fought under the WGA AI sideletter is not automatically an independence filing. It can become one if the replacement text is unchecked and unbylined.

The risk in one owner of CNN and CBS News is duplication: one model, two networks, one polished error. Efficiency will sell that as synergy. A board that cannot ask “who signed this” will call it standards.

This edition does not ban tools. It refuses to let “innovation” stand in for a name on the file.