On the afternoon of August 20, I visited the website of a shadowy group called Neighbors for Strong Communities. Days earlier, it had begun spamming Californians’ phones with a bullying warning: Paramount might leave the state, taking thousands of jobs with it, unless Attorney General Rob Bonta settled the lawsuit he and 11 other AGs filed to block the studio’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The site offered to help me write to Mr. Bonta. It also suggested that I describe a time when I or someone close to me had lost a job or struggled to make ends meet.
I typed 14 words: “Thank you AG Bonta for working to BLOCK THE MERGER and save media jobs.” I took a screenshot. The site stated it was “using what you shared to prepare a personalized message” to Attorney General Bonta.
Moments later, a draft appeared in my email account, signed with my name, email address, and ZIP code. “I remember a time when finding consistent work felt impossible,” the draft said, “and the worry that came with it was terrible.” It ended with: “I urge you to protect California jobs and drop your opposition to the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.”
I never described that memory. I never held that position. I never wrote about such hardship, and I most certainly never expressed that conclusion. All that was left was to push Send.
For more than two decades I’ve worked as an archival producer, which includes researching, licensing, and verifying the accuracy of third-party footage for documentaries. Three years ago, my colleagues Jennifer Petrucelli, Stephanie Jenkins, and I founded the Archival Producers Alliance. We wrote guidelines for the use of generative AI built around a simple idea: audiences deserve to know what is real. In this case, as I typed BLOCK THE MERGER, the AI re-created a truth for me — even though I had just typed the opposite.
The group’s letters run through Influent, an AI vendor founded by NSC’s co-founder, Tanner Kelly, who registered as a California lobbyist last year. Mr. Kelly calls the letters “AI-assisted” rather than AI-generated; the software, he says, simply helps people tell their “real” stories. The campaign, he claims, operates independently of Paramount. But he declined to acknowledge who pays for it.
The group was incorporated in June, roughly three months after Paramount launched its bid. Its website names no founders, board, or funders. Its listed address is a private P.O. box at a UPS in Santa Monica. Warner Bros. Discovery has denied funding the texts. Paramount has not commented.
Mr. Kelly’s site does allow senders to review a message before delivering it. But consider the design: the site asks you about the worst year of your working life, then creates a first-person narrative, with the conclusion seemingly set before you type a word. Such a system is not assisting the writer. It is assisting a client.
The broadband industry ran a cruder version in 2017, when the FCC proposed to repeal its net neutrality rules: of the 22 million public comments, nearly 18 million were fake. The goal was to give the FCC chairman “volume and intellectual cover.” It worked. Those campaigns run by third parties counterfeited people writing comments. This one recruits real people and invents their reasoning.
Here, the texts went out the week Paramount asked a federal judge to make the states and the Writers Guild post a $1.88 billion bond to cover the “ticking fees” Paramount itself agreed to. Days earlier, Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, reportedly told his senior team he would begin moving the studio out of California on October 1st, unless Mr. Bonta settled. The bond, the ultimatum, and the texts share one purpose: to avoid going to trial in March. Antitrust law forbids acquisitions that may substantially lessen competition, and that is what the states convincingly allege. Courtrooms test the merits. An AI-generated distortion of my opinion does not.
The opposition to the merger wrote its own letter. More than 5,600 of us signed: grips, set designers, makeup artists, caterers, and even celebrities, frightened for their livelihoods. We rallied outside Warner’s headquarters on the morning of the shareholder vote, and outside the Washington dinner Mr. Ellison hosted for President Trump. At events across the country, workers stood up and described, unassisted, what consolidation would do to their families.
The proposed merger also poses a question about the future of our democracy. A merged Paramount-Warner would own CBS News and CNN — and their archives, the footage people like me use to tell our nation’s stories. The merger would allow Mr. Ellison to set the terms on which we access this history. It would grant him editorial control over our country’s memory.
My letter to Mr. Bonta ran 14 words, and every one of them was mine. The one the software signed for me was longer, smoother, but fake. The opposition to this merger is real. This astroturf effort? Not so much.
Artificial intelligence indeed.
