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Some Los Angeles Times opinion pieces will now be published with an artificial intelligence-generated rating of their political content, and an AI-generated list of alternative political views on that issue, the paper’s biotech billionaire owner announced on Monday.
The new AI “Insights” feature will only be applied to a range of opinion content in the paper, not its news reporting, according to a public letter announcing the change from Patrick Soon-Shiong, the medical entrepreneur who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018.
The AI-generated tool “operates independently” from the paper’s human journalists, and “the AI content is not reviewed by journalists before it is published”, the Los Angeles Times noted in a summary of the new feature.
The introduction of AI commentary on the paper’s published opinion pieces comes after months of public battles over the role of journalism between Soon-Shiong and Los Angeles Times opinion journalists, conflicts that mirror similar Donald Trump-era battles at the Washington Post, owned by the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Bezos recently announced that the Washington Post would only publish opinion pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets”, and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Soon-Shiong, who, like Bezos, has been accused of “anticipatory obedience” to Trump, and publicly praised by Elon Musk, is taking a different tack in reshaping his newspaper’s editorial and opinion section, which had recently promoted more liberal and progressive viewpoints.
In 2024, Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, blocked his paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, setting off a wave of resignations of opinion section staffers and prompting some Los Angeles Times readers to cancel their subscriptions in protest.
Soon-Shiong’s initial public comments on a podcast in December about his plan to label his newspaper’s journalism with an AI-generated “bias meter” prompted fierce pushback from the union representing the paper’s journalists.
Union leaders said in December that the paper’s owner “has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples”, and pledged they would continue to report according to the paper’s longstanding journalism ethics standards.
“We will firmly guard against any effort to improperly or unfairly alter our reporting,” the Los Angeles Times guild said in December.
In a statement on Monday, Soon-Shiong defended his new AI feature as in line with the paper’s mission statement, which says that the paper will “strive to take into account different perspectives, particularly if they don’t align with our own, to inform our views”.
“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 in a statement.
The paper made clear that the content provided by Soon-Shiong’s new AI Insights feature, which will not be not reviewed by the Los Angeles Times’ journalists, may not be accurate, noting that “artificial intelligence can be imperfect and incomplete”, and urging readers to report any errors that they find.
The political ratings feature will use “viewpoint analysis” to label Los Angeles Times content with a political perspective as “Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right or Right,” the paper said, producing these ratings through a partnership with Particle.News, a startup founded in 2024 by former Twitter engineers.
These ratings will apply not only to the paper’s opinion section pieces, but to any “articles that offer a point of view on an issue”, the paper said in a statement. That includes not only opinion columns and editorials, but also “news commentary, criticism, reviews, and more”, the paper said.
Soon-Shiong also announced the paper would be more clearly labeling its articles to distinguish news from opinion. “Any content written from a point of view may be labeled Voices, which helps to strengthen the separation between what’s news and what’s not,” he said in his statement.
The AI analysis of the content of these “voices” pieces, and alternate viewpoints, will be provided through a partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine company, the Los Angeles Times said.
The last remaining Los Angeles Times opinion section staffer announced in late February that she would take a buyout and leave the paper, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.
