The LA Times’ Political Rating “AI” Is A Silly Joke Aimed At Validating Wealthy Media Ownership’s Inherent Bias

Late last year we wrote about how LA Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong confidently announced that he was going to use AI to display “artificial intelligence-generated ratings” of news content, while also providing “AI-generated lists of alternative political views on that issue” under each article. After he got done firing a lot of longstanding LA Times human staffers, of course.

As we noted at the time Soon-Shiong’s gambit was a silly mess for many reasons.

One, a BBC study recently found that LLMs can’t even generate basic news story synopses with any degree of reliability. Two, Soon-Shiong is pushing the feature without review from humans (whom he fired). Three, the tool will inevitably reflect the biases of ownership, which in this case is a Trump-supporting billionaire keen to assign “both sides!” false equivalency on issues like clean air and basic human rights.

The Times’ new “insight” tool went live this week with a public letter from Soon-Shiong about its purported purpose:

“We are also releasing Insights, an AI-driven feature that will appear on some Voices content. The purpose of Insights is to offer readers an instantly accessible way to see a wide range of different AI-enabled perspectives alongside the positions presented in the article. I believe providing more varied viewpoints supports our journalistic mission and will help readers navigate the issues facing this nation.”

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the whole experiment to immediately backfire.

After the LA Times published a column by Gustavo Arellano suggesting that Anaheim, California should not forget its historic ties to the KKK and white supremacy, the LA Times’ shiny new AI system tried to “well, akshually” the story:

Earlier today the LA Times had AI-generated counterpoints to a column from @gustavoarellano.bsky.social. His piece argued that Anaheim, the city he grew up in, should not forget its KKK past.The AI "well, actually"-ed the KKK. It has since been taken off the piece.www.latimes.com/california/s…

— Ryan Mac