Generative AI has the potential to significantly disrupt work cultures and labour practices across many sectors. In journalism, debates currently ensue on the nature of the disruption in newsrooms around the world. This chapter attempts to surface some key issues and concerns informing these debates. It argues that they mainly revolve around the twin narratives of fear and hope, variously manifested across different regions, but with notable differences emerging between the Global South and Global North. The chapter uses ChatGPT as a lens through which to explore the debates around news organisations’ engagement with generative AI. The chapter examines ChatGPT within the broader context of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, which have long been integrated into everyday newsroom routines and practices. It argues that news organisations’ adoption or appropriation of generative AI is far more considered than the rhetoric that has attended conversations around the release of ChatGPT and the presumption of its wholesome and uncritical adoption by the media sector. There is evidential reticence in the use and adoption of ChatGPT particularly in the Global South where issues such as concerns over ‘training’ data bias, labour precarity in the media sector and the resilience of traditional journalistic professional cultures are shaping engagement with the application and generative AI more broadly.