The Los Angeles Times will be using a new artificial intelligence tool to give a “political rating” to its opinion stories and other articles, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong announced on Monday.
LAT’s new AI feature, dubbed Insights, will show readers where a story falls on the political spectrum; there will be five options: Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right, or Right. Beyond opinion stories, Insights will also grade Times’ “Voices” stories, which include news commentary, reviews and criticism.
“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,” Soon-Shiong said. “I believe providing more varied viewpoints supports our journalistic mission and will help readers navigate the issues facing this nation.”
Insights’ political grades will be generated in partnership with Particle.news, a Bay Area-based AI company. The LA Times will also be using Perplexity AI to “identify the ideas expressed in a Voices article,” as well as share links to additional sources. For stories with a certain political viewpoint, Insights will offer readers links to sources with different views, the newspaper said on the technology’s explainer page.
The AI grades and insights will not be reviewed by journalists before they are published. Reader feedback will be incorporated to produce “better, more accurate results over time,” LAT added.
Insights is the latest change to hit the LA Times in recent months. Notably, Soon-Shiong nixed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris last year — a move that led to several staffers quitting. One editorial writer who quit even called him a “chickens—t” who threw the editorial team “under the bus.”
In January, Soon-Shiong said it has been a “struggle” to get his newsroom to buy into a more balanced ideological approach, following the canceled Harris endorsement. “Change is difficult, right? I respect that, and I have empathy for that,” the billionaire told Fox News Digital earlier this year.
Last week, more than 40 newsroom employees at the LA Times took buyout offers.
Moving forward, the Times is not the only major paper leveraging AI. The New York Times recently announced that its own AI tool, named Echo, will be used to summarize articles. NYT staffers are also being trained on how to use AI to edit their work and suggest catchy headlines and social media posts.
