The LA Times’ Political Rating “AI” Is A Silly Joke Aimed At Validating Wealthy Media Ownership’s Inherent Bias
from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept
Late last year we wrote about how LA Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong confidently announced that he was going to use AI to display “artificial intelligence-generated ratings” of news content, while also providing “AI-generated lists of alternative political views on that issue” under each article. After he got done firing a lot of longstanding LA Times human staffers, of course.
As we noted at the time Soon-Shiong’s gambit was a silly mess for many reasons.
One, a BBC study recently found that LLMs can’t even generate basic news story synopses with any degree of reliability. Two, Soon-Shiong is pushing the feature without review from humans (whom he fired). Three, the tool will inevitably reflect the biases of ownership, which in this case is a Trump-supporting billionaire keen to assign “both sides!” false equivalency on issues like clean air and basic human rights.
The Times’ new “insight” tool went live this week with a public letter from Soon-Shiong about its purported purpose:
“We are also releasing Insights, an AI-driven feature that will appear on some Voices content. 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. I believe providing more varied viewpoints supports our journalistic mission and will help readers navigate the issues facing this nation.”
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the whole experiment to immediately backfire.
After the LA Times published a column by Gustavo Arellano suggesting that Anaheim, California should not forget its historic ties to the KKK and white supremacy, the LA Times’ shiny new AI system tried to “well, akshually” the story:
Yeah, whoops a daisy. That’s since been deleted by human editors.
If you’re new to American journalism, the U.S. press already broadly suffers from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or the false belief that every issue has multiple, conflicting sides that must all be treated equally. It’s driven by a lust to maximize ad engagement and not offend readers (or sources, or event sponsors) with the claim that some things are just inherently false.
If you’re too pointed about the truth, you might lose a big chunk of ad-clicking readership. If you’re too pointed about the truth, you might alienate potential sources. If you’re too pointed about the truth, you might upset deep-pocketed companies, event sponsors, advertisers, or those in power. So what you often get is a sort of feckless mush that looks like journalism, but is increasingly hollow.
As a result, radical right wing authoritarianism has been normalized. Pollution caused climate destabilization has been downplayed. Corporations and CEOs are allowed to lie without being challenged by experts. Overt racism is soft-pedaled. You can see examples of this particular disease everywhere you look in modern U.S. journalism (including Soon-Shiong’s recent decision to stop endorsing Presidential candidates while America stared down the barrel of destructive authoritarianism).
This sort of feckless truth aversion is what’s destroying consumer trust in journalism, but the kind of engagement-chasing affluent men in positions of power at places like the LA Times, Semafor, or Politico can’t (or won’t) see this reality because it runs in stark contrast to their financial interests.
Letting journalism consolidate in the hands of big companies and a handful of rich (usually white) men results in a widespread, center-right, corporatist bias that media owners desperately want to pretend is the gold standard for objectivity. Countless human editors at major U.S. media companies are routinely oblivious to this reality (or hired specifically for their willingness to ignore it).
Since AI is mostly a half-baked simulacrum of knowledge, it can’t “understand” much of anything, including modern media bias. There’s no possible way language learning models could analyze the endless potential ideological or financial conflicts of interests running in any given article and just magically fix it with a wave of a wand. The entire premise is delusional.
Most major mainstream media moguls primarily see AI as a way to cut corners, cut costs, and undermine organized labor. Whether the technology actually works all that well is usually an afterthought to the kind of fail-upward brunchlords that dominate management at major media outlets.
The LA Times’ “Insight” automation is also a glorified sales pitch for Soon-Shiong’s software, since he’s a heavy investor in medical sector automation. So of course he’s personally, deeply invested in the idea that these technologies are far more competent and efficient than they actually are. That’s the sales pitch.
Which is amusing given that one of the software’s first efforts was to generate a lengthy defense of AI on the heels of an LA Times column warning about the potential dangers of unregulated AI:
“Responding to the human writers, the AI tool argued not only that AI “democratizes historical storytelling”, but also that “technological advancements can coexist with safeguards” and that “regulation risks stifling innovation.”
The pretense that these LLMs won’t reflect the biases of ownership is delusional. Even if they worked properly and weren’t a giant energy suck, they’re not being implemented to mandate genuine objectivity, they’re being implemented to validate affluent male ownership’s perception of genuine objectivity. That’s inevitably going to result in even more center-right, pro corporate, truth-averse pseudo-journalism.
There are entire companies that are dedicated to this idea of analyzing news websites and determining reliability and trustworthiness, and most of them (like Newsguard) fail constantly, routinely labeling propaganda outlets like Fox News as credible. And they fail, in part, because being truly honest about any of this (especially the increasingly radical nature of the U.S. right wing) isn’t good for business.
We’re seeing in real time how rich, right wing men are buying up newsrooms and hollowing them out like pumpkins, replacing real journalism with a feckless mush of ad-engagement chasing infotainment and gossip simulacrum peppered with right wing propaganda. It’s not at all subtle, and was more apparent than ever during the last election cycle.
The idea that half-cooked, fabulism-prone language learning models will somehow make this better is laughable, but it’s very obvious LA Times ownership, financial conflicts of interest and abundant personal biases in hand, is very excited to pretend otherwise.
Filed Under: ai, automation, bias, insights, journalism, llms, media, patrick soon-shiong, regulation
Companies: la times
Comments on “The LA Times’ Political Rating “AI” Is A Silly Joke Aimed At Validating Wealthy Media Ownership’s Inherent Bias”
And on the other hand, we have the New York Times, which does all the same bullshit without AI. 🙃
I want AI to eliminate billionaires and CEOs
If they are so capable surely we can use them to solve real problems.
All this internet industry that’s living on the false promise that, just as economic growth, AI/LLM will keep improving steadily until it will make a bunch of money, somehow magically, even after loosing a lot (because no AI companies is actually making money but losing a lot) is disgusting.
I won’t pretend that I’ve got better idea to spent theses hundreds of billions (even if I do, like everyone), and I will not say that AI, to some extend, aren’t neat technology, but every single thing of this planet has limitations that we need time and money to find them using research, before we can use them properly.
But it seems that industry prefers, just like in 60s where nuclear energy where supposed to fuel every single thing in our society, to try to walk into every possible random direction until something is finally working correctly, instead of focusing on modest but concrete uses, on finding sometime useful.
'It keeps saying I'm a 'brainless dolt who doesn't know anything', clearly it's broken.'
Those pushing for AI to replace human writers love to claim that it’s meant to cut out(among other things) ‘human bias’ but you need only ask yourself one question to expose that for the lie it is:
Does anyone think they would keep using an AI that repeatedly told them that their positions and their claims were wrong?
Re: Reeducation
Research has shown that retraining an AI is possible and fairly well understood. Retraining human journalists is much harder.
And more important, the AI is far less likely to leak that it has been retrained to match it’s masters’ bias.
It’s crazy how short-sighted this push for “AI” “journalism” is. Modern media already suffers from having too much data and too little safeguards; we’re sourcing so much info from social media sites like Twitter and not doing the due-diligence to ensure we’re not putting garbage in, so we get garbage out. And so much of it is made for engagement first and above all other considerations.
Now these corps are pushing for slop machines to replace the few humans still trying to sift gold from the endless silt, and they’re terrible at it. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s cheaper than the alternative and people have gotten used to pyrite.
Efforts like Insight are just adding fuel to the pyre of US journalism.
‘Chat GPT, I’m a Nazi but admitting that makes me feel bad. Rewrire the news in a way that confirms my bias.’
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Philip K Dick was right.
Maybe US Americans should stop getting their news from Western media outlets. Try looking at South Africa’s Independent OnLine or Al Jazeera.
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Or you could go fuck yourself right now.
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You’re exactly like a Trojan. You have only one use, and then you’re trash.
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More like a Trojan with a hole in the end: no use whatsoever.
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Lacking A Market
Allowing news organizations to operate without providing both sides of the story causes the organization to devolve into a left wing echo chamber that loses mainstream viewership, until it becomes ripe for the picking by a wealthy corporate benefactor.
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In other words, reporting the truth necessarily results in a left-wing echo chamber? You’re so close to understanding…
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See, this is the exact kind of thinking that led to decisions like the one talked about in this article. If two people tell a reporter different stories about the weather in a given place at a given time, the reporter’s job isn’t to report “both sides” with equal weight as if they could both be correct—it’s to report which one of those people told the truth and which one of them lied. Acting as if “both sides” of any given issue are automatically equal in both credibility and validity is high-level dumbassery; thinking journalists have to report on “both sides” with that same mentality is even worse.
That besides: Have any of the right-wing rags you read ever reported on “left wing” ideas as if they carry the same validity as, and should be treated as equal to, conservate ideology?
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Most events are not so cut and dry, particularly involving human interaction. If one does take it upon themself to be the arbiter of events, then they also put their credibility on the line. Unfortunately for the legacy media, their track record of candidate endorsements and policy preferences have left much to be desired from the readership, and so now their credibility is shot.
There’s an easy way to avoid this, which is the view from nowhere. However, it requires that you trust your readership, and you allow them to reach their own conclusions, and the media outlet doesn’t get to steer the conversation.
No, which is what makes them a right-wing rag. But their credibility will stand on its own, and not on the past legacy of millions of viewers/readers who have now vanished, and they’re not crying for a bailout.
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And that’s why papers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are losing credibility: Rather than being a fair arbiter of events and pointing out when one side is provably full of shit, those papers take the “view from nowhere” approach and refuse to say when one side is full of shit. The NYT, for example, has lost a lot of credibility with anyone who isn’t a transphobe because it’s been treating fact-free transphobic claims about trans people and backed-by-science facts about trans people (as well as the lived experiences of trans people) as equally valid. (I’m sure you’re okay with that, though.)
When one side is provably lying their asses off and a “view from nowhere” article either refuses to say that side is lying or treats that side as valid despite lying, readers will draw a conclusion—but it isn’t the one where they think “that side is lying”. False neutrality is propaganda.
Which is why they have little-to-no credibility: They report lies as if they were truths and report truths as if they were lies. Fox News did it so much, and so often, that it cost them nearly a billion dollars.
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No, they LOST all credibility long ago. They have been running on empty for quite some time, certainly at least a decade. The changes to transition to a neutral publication is a very recent development.
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“No, they LOST all credibility long ago”
This is you by the way.
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No such thing exists because no one can separate bias from journalism. Someone must decide what to distill out of the mass of available data, what facts to check, how much context to include (and explain), and how much needs to be left out for time and space. If you want to read a few paragraphs that sum up a 65-page legal ruling, someone must choose what to include and what to leave out.
But even if journalism can’t be unbiased, it can still be good or bad. Good journalism reports the facts even if those facts say one side is irredeemably awful and/or full of shit. Bad journalism pretends both sides are equally valid. False neutrality isn’t journalism—it’s propaganda. And I bring up the New York Times and the decidedly anti-trans (and therefore right-wing) slant on its reporting of transgender issues as proof.
You’re the kind of asshole who thinks a newspaper that hears “trans people should be allowed to exist” and “trans people should be run out of society for starters” as two opposing “sides” must treat those “sides” as equally valid even as the second “side” is, at a bare minimum, calling for what one might term a “soft genocide” of trans people. I’d bet good money that you not only don’t believe in “neutral journalism”, but that you’d love seeing every major mainstream outlet stoop to “view from nowhere” journalism because that approach rewards liars and bigots with unearned credibility.
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This is the fundamental flaw in your understanding. You are equating two different metrics that are at best tangentially related. Credibility based on reader preference has nothing to do with accuracy, objectivity, or independence. Credibility based on accuracy requires use of factual analysis and reporting. The former is profitable, the latter is not.
There’s a reason why Fox News settle for almost a trillion dollars in a defamation suit, and is likely to do it again. They simply lie to their consumer base, who then consider the credible, despite all evidence to the contrary.
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*billion. Auto-correct typo.
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The Republican party is an anti-science conglomeration of bigots and religious nuts that largely persists as a matter of scapegoating and abusive behaviors.
It’s pretty fucking cut and dried.
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Dogmatically pushing for “both sides of the story” can also raise bad arguments as if they’re on the same level as better-supported positions.
Flat-earthers and young Earth creationists do not deserve the same attention or page space as the scientific reality. Anti-vaxxers do not become more credible just because they’re “the other side.” And if journalism cannot function without catering to these bad positions, then you’re going to get bad journalism.
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You continue to confuse reader preference with objective reporting.
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The false balance you advocate for is in reality a bias favoring lies.
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Would you support the media owned by Rupert Murdoch and the likes of the Daily Caller, Wire, Breitbart et al being forced to be politically ‘neutral’ the way you pretend to cheerlead for when it comes to the reporting of facts?
Re: "It's wet and raining." "No, it's dry and sunny out."
The saying goes that a responsible journalism isn’t to just report that Mister White said it’s raining, but Mister Black claimed it’s actually dry, cloudless and sunny, but rather to look out the damn window and assess which whether Mister White or Mister black has the fact on their side.
Bringing the parable to here and now:
You keep insisting that all the reports that we’re seeing of heavy rain and flood waters lapping at the river banks, are politically “biased” — mere ideological propaganda (a.k.a. “Fake News”).
But the rest of us, who really want to know whether we need our umbrellas today, and perhaps maybe whether it’s time to start piling sandbags, we are very tired of these questions being perpetually cast as needlessly stupid, needlessly partisan, political issues.
For some reason, people who care about reality, think that the people who perpetually insist on denying the evidence, keep trying to ban wearing (or even destroy) rain gear, and keep throwing out the town’s emergency supplies, while endlessly whining that anyone who has actually looked out the windows must be part of an “echo chamber” allegedly supporting some fantastically malicious “meteorologist agenda” — despite the distinctive squelching noises from their own drenched footwear — are idiots and fools (dangerous idiots and fools at that).
AI is an excuse to sack qualified staff since ai takes data from millions of websites including tight wing maga blogs youtube videos theres no way it can be accurate garbage in garbage out .it cant tell what is misinformation versus accurate reporting
Spend Billions to Make Something Worse
I don’t understand these billionaires like this guy or Bezos who spent tons and tons of $ for newspapers only to make them worse.
…shed subscriptions, crappier coverage, make the news for screw-ups like this AI thing. Any why buy an established brand?
It seems like its just an attempt to ruin these products and the billionaires give some facile reason “Oh its to make it more freedom friendly” when its just to destroy it.
Why not just buy it and shut it down if they want to destroy it?
Re: Propaganda
A free and independent press is an asset that is needed in a democracy. Making clear that a politician spreads fertilizer (bullshit) on a topic may help to create the correct decision in a true democracy.
Getting the decisions you like as a business owner is far easier if you own the public opinion. Owning media is a big step to achieve that. Communist Russia knew that (Pravda means Truth), Nazi-Germany knew it (The Big Lie).
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Short term thinking:
– people trust the brand
– brand costs two million a month to run
– brand makes a modest profit
– but cut the running costs in half, say
– and expect people still trust the brand
– two and a half million more profit just next quarter
– and every quarter thereafter 🙂
Misread, But Actually...
I read “effluent men” on first glance.
I think it’s better that way. 😉
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I can mesh with that.
I don’t see the problem with the highlighted section, or does Karl now have an issue with the facts?
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The fact is that the Klan was, is, and always will be an explicitly hate-driven movement. Downplaying that with some “AcKsHuAlLy It’S aBoUt WhItE pRoTeStAnT cUlTuRe!!!” bullshit—regardless of the factual nature of such a statement—doesn’t make that fact any less of one. At the height of the Klan’s power, it terrorized and killed Black people with near-complete impunity. If you really need to know whether the Klan is about “Protestant culture” or hate, ask yourself this: What makes the average Klan member want to hide the fact that they’re a member?