LA Times Uses AI to Provide "Different Views" on the KKK

The Los Angeles Times is now shoving artificial intelligence into its opinion articles — and it already seems to be backfiring. Earlier this week, the newspaper's billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong announced that the LA Times would be "releasing new features to enhance and improve our digital product," including "insights" on opinion pieces that offer a "wide range of different AI-enabled perspectives." In other words, AI will generate counter-arguments to opinion pieces penned by the newspaper's human experts, with no input from the paper's journalists. Shortly thereafter, reporters noticed that an excellent article about Anaheim residents kicking the Ku Klux Klan out of town 100 years prior had been amended to include some dodgy AI-generated addendums. Generated with the help of Perplexity — an AI startup that announced its partnership with the LA Times in December, and which is being sued by the New York Times and other outlets for alleged copyright infringement — the since-d ... Read full article.