New York Becomes First State to Require Employers Disclose When Layoffs Are Due to AI
If you lose your job as part of mass layoffs at your company because your boss believes an artificial intelligence model can do your work instead, they will have to start filing more paperwork disclosing the decision.
That is according to a new law in New York state that requires employers to disclose if mass layoffs — which is defined as 50 or more workers — were due to AI.
The change to New York's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system went into effect in March, but has received little coverage since then; Bloomberg was the first major outlet to report on the change on Thursday.
Now, employers have to fill out a form at least 90 days before a mass layoff round, according to New York law, and check a box if the cuts are due to 'technological innovation or automation.' If that box is checked, the employers then go to another screen on the WARN website where they have to specify whether AI or another technology is the reason for the cuts.
New York is the first state with such a law. Other states have looked to put safeguards in place against AI replacing workers, including in California, which had a law go into effect at the start of 2025 which protects actors from having their likeness used by AI models without informed consent; California also passed a similar law last year that requires the estates of dead actors and performers to give clearance for AI models to use their likeness.
The new law in New York comes as AI's rapid rise has led to questions over which jobs are safe in a number of fields.
This has been an issue in the media world as of late, where a number of outlets, like Axel Springer and News Corp. have signed content licensing deals with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Editorial staff at some outlets have said they are concerned about newsrooms growing too cozy with AI models; the Vox Media Union, for example, called for protections to be put in place for writers at outlets like New York Magazine and The Verge so that their jobs would not be taken by AI bots.
That concern is a common one in the U.S. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found 52% of Americans were 'worried' about AI in the workplace, compared to 36% who said they were 'hopeful' about it.
The post New York Becomes First State to Require Employers Disclose When Layoffs Are Due to AI appeared first on TheWrap.
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