Patrick Soon-Shiong says LAT opinion pieces will show an AI-generated rating of their political content, and an AI-generated list of alternative political views
I am proud to announce the next evolution of the L.A. Times to better engage with our audience. Katie Kilkenny / The Hollywood Reporter : L.A. Times Owner Adds Bias Meter, AI-Generated Copy On Articles, Drawing Criticism From Guild Raw Story : LA Times adds AI-generated counterpoints to opinion pieces Bluesky: Joel S. / @joelhs : This is what happens when news media is owned by people who don't actually understand anything about writing, or reporting, or literacy at all for that matter. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 2025... Twilight Greenaway / @twyspy : This would have been shocking a year ago. Now it just seems par for the course in a landscape of billionaires showing their true colors. It's the speed of normalization that's most astounding. — www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 2025... Crawford Kilian / @crof : Yet another reason to be glad I cancelled my LAT subsciption last fall: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 2025... Karl Bode / @karlbode.com : a recent BBC study found that “AI” couldn't even generate news story synopses with any accuracy, and this billionaire clown thinks it will magically be able to identify partisan bias @hypervisible : Really looking forward to all the leftist texts recommended by Perplexity 🤦🏿♂️ [embedded post] Mastodon: Jeri Dansky / @jeridansky@sfba.social : I hesitated to cancel my subscription to the LA Times because it does excellent reporting on some topics, including water issues (thanks largely to @ianjames) and bird flu in California. Yeah, its political stance is atrocious. But when it added AI use — even limited use — on top of this, I finally cancelled. … Forums: r/Journalism : LA Times to display AI-generated political rating on opinion pieces r/politics : LA Times to display AI-generated political rating on opinion pieces See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The L.A. Times is moving AI from back-end production into the reader-facing interpretation of opinion journalism. The rollout was immediately tested when the paper removed its AI “Insights” feature after it defended the Ku Klux Klan in one case.
Follow-up reporting also found that the feature’s sourcing and political labels were hard to evaluate, underscoring that the product is making editorial judgments rather than merely summarizing text.
First-order effects
- L.A. Times opinion readers and writers will see machine-generated political ratings and purported alternative viewpoints attached to columns, placing an AI layer between the article and its audience.
- The feature’s credibility is immediately constrained by its failure mode: the paper removed an AI output after a highly visible harmful response, while scrutiny of the tool’s sources and labels raised questions about its editorial reliability.
Second-order effects
- Editors will need review, escalation, and correction processes for AI-generated political framing; otherwise, errors can become a reputational liability for both individual contributors and the publisher.
- Other publishers considering reader-facing AI annotations will have a concrete example that product safety depends on more than generating plausible counterarguments; sourcing and classification standards become core product requirements.
Third-order effects
- If publishers keep adding AI interpretation around reported and opinion content, editorial authority may increasingly be exercised through product design—labels, rankings, and generated context—not just editing and commissioning.
- The episode points to a broader contest over whether AI can mediate political discourse at publication scale without importing opaque sourcing, unreliable categorization, or harmful false equivalence.
The trend: News organizations are experimenting with AI as a visible editorial-intermediation layer, forcing them to treat model outputs as accountable publishing decisions rather than neutral automation.