The Los Angeles Times has seen better days as the company’s billionaire owner continues taking a wrecking ball to the nearly 150-year-old institution. Waves of layoffs and editorial interference by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a vocal Trump supporter, has tanked morale, and now the owner has set his sights on AI as the panacea that will improve trust and, ultimately, the fortunes of the newspaper. Soon-Shiong announced this week that opinion articles will now include an AI-powered bias meter that labels articles based on an algorithm’s perceived interpretation of its political leanings. The new labels include “Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right or Right,” and are determined by a startup called Particle.News, which was founded by former Twitter engineers. There will also be a section called “Viewspoints,” powered by AI startup Perplexity, that will display alternative views to those put forth in an article. These new AI products will apply not just to opinion pieces but any “articles that offer a point of view on an issue,” according to a statement received by The Guardian. Opinion-oriented articles will be more clearly delineated from straight news reports with a new “Voices” label. Standard news articles will not include the AI features.
Voices and Insights button now live @latimes. Try it. Now the voice and perspective from all sides can be heard, seen and read —no more echo chamber. Thanks to our talented content management software team running this Graphene platform pic.twitter.com/HslD5dKinz — Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) March 3, 2025 It is all a bit ironic that Soon-Shiong claims to be trying to improve trust in the media when he recently caught flak for interfering with an opinion piece and editing the submission to make it appear more positive about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Multiple staffers left after Soon-Shiong similarly interfered in an article regarding one of his friends who got into an altercation over a dog attack. It does not instill much “trust” when the billionaire owner is second-guessing journalists’ decisions about newsworthiness and getting personally involved when reporters are investigating his friends.
While the Times’ editorial union is not necessarily opposed to displaying alternative opinions against an article, they say that AI is not the way to do this. The AI-generated viewpoints will not be scrutinized by editors, and of course, AI models continue to make up information and get basic queries wrong (during the recent Oscars, ChatGPT surfaced nominees from the wrong year). Already, the Guardian reports that some of the contrasting viewpoints suggested by the AI tool were featured in the article itself. “The money for this endeavor could have been directed elsewhere: supporting our journalists on the ground who have had no cost-of-living increase since 2021,” said Matt Hamilton, vice president of the LATimes Guild. It seems inevitable that we are heading towards a place where the internet is rife with AI-created, pseudo-academic writing filled with made-up facts and quotes, which will then get cemented into “knowledge” as those articles become the training fodder for future models. How much of this will end up in the alternative viewpoints on Times articles?
Perplexity, it should be noted, has shown disdain for the journalism industry in general by scraping articles and regurgitating them almost whole-cloth in its chatbot, claiming fair use over the practice. When New York Times staffers went on strike last year during labor negotiations, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas offered to provide AI tools that he suggested could replace them. Showing similar disdain for his own employees, it would not be surprising to see Soon-Shiong expand the use of AI to write entire articles. Other news organizations have experimented with AI in small and subtle ways. The Washington Post now automatically summarizes articles and surfaces key points at the top. That newspaper is experiencing its own turmoil as billionaire owner Jeff Bezos pivots from a hands-off ownership to exerting more control and making its opinion section entirely pro-capitalism and “free markets.” The Post lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers since Bezos blocked the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris and has again bled subscribers following the changes to the opinion section. It was only a few years ago that the likes of Bezos appeared to be benevolent billionaires who would swoop in and save legacy media from the destruction wrought by the internet. We were naive to believe that. This was always going to be the problem with news organizations owned by billionaires with conflicting interests. Today, the name of the game is pleasing President Trump so he does not go on the attack against Amazon, and perhaps tosses Blue Origin some new contracts.
