LA Times Deploys AI to Evaluate and Contextualise Opinion Pieces

The Los Angeles Times is introducing an AI-driven feature that will analyse the political content of select opinion pieces, providing an AI-generated rating along with a list of alternative perspectives on the topic.

This new "Insights" tool will summarise an opinion piece’s stance and suggest “different views on the topic,” linking to other news articles or blog posts.

However, it will only be applied to opinion content, not news reporting, according to a public letter from Patrick Soon-Shiong, the medical entrepreneur who acquired the Los Angeles Times in 2018.

The AI tool is touted to function autonomously, without human oversight from the paper’s journalists.

The Los Angeles Times has clarified that "the AI content is not reviewed by journalists before it is published".

The introduction of this AI-generated commentary follows months of internal tensions between Soon-Shiong and the paper’s opinion journalists over the role of journalism in the publication.