Eight winners and finalists in this year’s Pulitzers used artificial intelligence somewhere in their reporting. That fact sits awkwardly next to a year of layoffs blamed on automation, and both things are true at once, which is the part worth working through. The AI that wins prizes and the AI that eliminates jobs are being deployed by different people for different reasons, and conflating them makes the industry’s conversation about this worse.

To the Members of Congress, Regulatory Agencies, and Policymakers, We write to urge restraint. As you consider new rules for artificial intelligence, we ask you to resist the instinct to regulate first and understand later. The history of transformative technologies — the printing press, electricity, the internet — teaches the same lesson every time: premature regulation calcifies incumbents, chills experimentation, and rarely protects the people it claims to serve. Innovation needs room to fail.