Has the AI ​​really defended the KKK at the end of my column? Let’s discuss

Journalism schools teach that writers should point out the news, not be the news. But what happens when one of your articles becomes viral-not for its content, but rather for the way an IA Dooickey swallowed what you wrote and cooked a controversial summation?

Welcome to my week.

On February 25, the Times published my columna Towards the 100th anniversary of the moment when the voters of Anaheim launched four members of Ku Klux Klan outside the municipal council. The fact that many readers were bubbling to my statement that the lack of attention given to the birthday was not surprising for me because Anaheim is a place that likes to “celebrate the positive”. More than a few insisted on the fact that the KKK in the County of Orange of the 1920s was not as bad as in the South, which was such an OC answer as I did not think about it.

No, the real pleasure started on Monday, when the Times launched information. It is a tool generated by the artificial intelligence that reviews the article to set a classification on the place where the piece landed on the political spectrum. (My play Klan, for example? It is apparently “on the left”, which is a conclusion as surprising as the end of the original “Karate Kid”.)

This feature also offers a summary of the ball, alternative points of view and relevant links from the Internet of other articles, columns and press reports.

Other recent columns of me have obtained a “center on the left”, a “center” and even a “center on the right”. I still miss “right” on my lotería map.

In a letter to readers presenting the functionality, the owner of the Times, Dr. Patrick, Soon-Shiong wrote that he thought that “the supply of more varied points of view supports our journalistic mission and will help readers to navigate the problems faced by this nation”.

Well, one of the insights did not take long, well, information to show people in red.

Reading critical articles from the KKK, he said: “Local historical accounts occasionally supervise Klan in the 1920s as a“ white Protestant culture ”product that meets societal changes rather than a movement explicitly focused on hatred, Minimize your ideological threat.“”

The italics are mine, so put a pin on this sentence because it is important.

Soon the titles started:

It only took Times to sympathize with the KKK.

Times draws a new AI tool article after defending the KKK.

The new Times IA tool sympathized with the KKK.

And again and again. Some of the writers of the articles have expressed the sentence “minimizing its ideological threat” or seemed to claim that it did not exist. But this part of the sentence is crucial: it argues that too many people in the County of Orange have historically minimized the dangers of KKK.

IA’s tool may have been guilty of blurred and clumsy phrasing, but it did it not Defend or sympathize with the KKK.

Journalists like to complain that criticism of their articles do not read the title. Well, it was a case of journalists who did not read the first clause of a sentence.

In fact, as I pointed out on X, this quote was correct. I was in fact shocked that AI obtained such a crucial point. But I was also annoyed that the other two chips – including one who linked to one of my columns in 2018 on the Klan in OC – were not out of their context, but no one else seemed to worry about.

Anyway, friends began to send me stories of local and national outlets in the hours following the appearance of my online chronicle claiming that the Times tool used by the Times approved the KKK. Some readers have announced that they were announcing their subscriptions to Times, saying that they did not want their money to support a publication which, in one way or another, gave a boost to the Klan.

Discontent of ideas, too long a deconstruction of my columna made that some people concluded that this minimized the horror of the KKK.

But proclaiming it literally approved the hate group?

A single journalist contacted me as a writer of the column which caused Ai Klan-Gate. My opinion would have been given with pleasure and without having all the arrivals.

As a journalist, I hope that my contemporaries who reported the situation would have been a little more precise on the description of the language they have seen on functionality. The net effect was to give the impression that the AI ​​tool had practically burned a cross to show its support for the KKK on a column that explicitly denounced the invisible Empire.

They were more suspended from the IA tool of Times and not to the real journalism that preceded it, which makes me think that they did not even read my column. Thank you, friends!

As for readers who said that the cancellation of their time subscriptions was a way to put their anger at the time to use the information, here is the thing: you have to press a button to trigger the thing. Like the comments section, you can get involved with it or not. You can just choose to read what humans have to say – and criticize or rent them. Why, if you ignore AI pendejada Enough, he could very well take his digital football and go home.

If there is a silver lining to all of this, it is because I can be a prophet. In December, I predicted that whatever the AI ​​program that Los Angeles Times would end up using its opinion on its opinion, it would self-immerse itself when it encountered one of mine.

Which should count as a lotería square, right?