By Liam Reilly | Cnn
The billionaire owner of Los Angeles Times, who unveiled an AI tool which generates opposite prospects to display on opinion stories, was not aware that the new tool had created pro -KK arguments less than 24 hours after its launch – and a few hours after the demonstration of AI comments. The incident presents a massive obstacle for Times, which seeks to win back the old subscribers and to crown the new ones with a new series of offers.
During an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Executive President of Times, admitted that he had seen neither the play nor the response of the AI. But he said that the deletion of content has shown that there were operational “checks and counterweights” to the recently introduced system, coming out of the moment as a learning opportunity.
“(The incident is) a good lesson to show that at least artificial intelligence is not yet entirely there (…) It is in order to understand this,” said Soon Shiong.
Early on Tuesday, the new AI tool generated counterpoints to a column of February 25 of the Times chronicler Gustavo Arellano. The chronicle of Arellano argued that Anaheim, California, should not forget the role of the Ku Klux Klan in its past – calling the white supremacist group “A stain on a place that likes to celebrate the positive” – and connect it to the political landscape of today. But the divergent views generated by the Times “AI produced a softer vision of the far -right group, which she called” the “white Protestant culture” responding to societal changes rather than a movement explicitly focused on hatred “.
Although the comments generated by the AI have since been removed from the play, and Arellano has come to say that “AI has really obtained this right” because “the ocers have minimized Klan from the 1920s as an anti-racist since this happened”, the lack of awareness of the owner of the newspaper to the controversy is a blurred problem.
Arellano’s play is not the only one to have a mistake generated by AI or misleading comments within 24 hours of the introduction of the AI tool. An editorial by Scott Jennings about President Donald Trump’s response to Los Angeles forest fires was examined after the Times’ tool qualified the centrist piece despite his discussion points on the right. The counters generated by AI-AI also not noted that Trump had threatened to retain federal aid in Los Angeles unless his leaders comply with specific requests.
AI’s tool, which is nicknamed “Insights”, is part of a series of announcements unveiled by Soon Shiong on Monday. In addition to the Insights button that appears next to all the opinion stories – a section which has now been renamed as a voice – Soon Shiong has also made its debut a bias counter and a live programming from the Times studios.
The changes arise several months after the Soon Shiong has announced its intention to add AI tools to the website, part of the publisher’s thrust to use a younger audience and the Conservatives. They also come after months of troubles have shaken the point of sale, in particular an exodus of readers and members of the editorial committee following a blocked editorial, mass dismissals, voluntary redemptions, a botched assembly which reversed the position of a writer and comments by Soon Shiong who has undermined his own journalist.
Voice and ideas
Despite the immediate alarming results, Soon-Shiong told CNN that the parts generated by the insights were not trying to create division responses but rather, inclusive.
“He actually tries to say:” OK, that’s what this play tries to say with (…) all the references of “”, said Soon-Shiong. “And then, if you do not agree with what this piece says – because it is a voice, it is not a new one – it is an opportunity for us to share with you an alternative opinion that someone else would look linked to their references.”
If readers do not agree with a piece of voice, the Insights button should provide an alternative view, he said. He added that the New Voices HUB stems from this inclusive inclination and from the desire to clearly separate the opinion section from the editorial room.
Insights deploys the Times internal graphene content management system to determine the bias of a story, performing a word analysis by word to generate an alternative view. The graphene was formed by associating with external AI models and using decades of content of times and historical parts, which have all been validated using automatic learning and an editorial examination process to establish a bias scale, said Soon Shiong. In his Monday letter to readers, Soon Shiong described the tool as “an experimental and scalable technology”. But he told CNN that a team had spent months continuing to develop the tool after having initially tightened it in December. Like the other AI platforms, the tool will continue to learn because it ingests more votes.
The perspectives generated by AI are accompanied by a source so that readers can find out more about a particular position. But a laboratory review Nieman Bshistring has found several problems with the sources and even the way they are cited. On certain occasions, the AI tool has cited mediocre or less than harvestable sources, while on other occasions, it duplicated sources in quotes. Elsewhere, the AI tool used quotes to deceive the effect, articulation of a missing point in the cited source.
To correct errors, Soon Shiong says that there is a certain level of human surveillance, but it is difficult for the team to validate all the responses in real time given the scale to which the tool is applied. Beyond the team responsible for supervising the tool, readers who encounter AI errors are encouraged to report problems on the Times Insights page or in the comments section.
Times is hardly the first publisher to impregnate its website with AI tools, and most of the editorial rooms or news that added an AI to writing or reports have given disastrous results. Two years after the launch of Openai Chatgpt, even the most sophisticated AI chatbots remain in the grip of problems of precision and reliability.
There is, of course, rationalize the advantages for AI in the editorial room: AI tools can speed up news and, with human surveillance, the problems of capture in the articles. But the publication of content not evaluated by AI is a massive gambit – it risks offering inaccuracies that mallabed readers and undermines confidence.
The Times Studio and the following Times
The live element – a project nicknamed “The Stream” of Times Studio, the Times production studio behind television, film and audio of the release – was also presented on Monday. As part of the company, the studio will produce 12 hours of live streaming original per day covering news, entertainment, food, business, culture, lifestyle and real crime. To feed the massive company, the Times studio works in close collaboration with the editorial hall, said Soon Shiong, but he is also integrating the studio engagement staff to manage the technical aspects of streaming, shooting and production.
Absent from the Soon-Shiong announcements list on Monday was the mention of the Times Next, a project that the billionaire has developed quietly alongside others.
In February, status described Times Next as “a new entity that will highlight digital personalities, many of whom will appeal to the base of Maga”. But Soon Shiong rejected this description as a “speculation”. While he refused to clarify what the project will imply, he told CNN that the Times Next will be located in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Nashville and several other places nationwide.
Soon Shiong also refused to comment on the status report according to which Jennings is attached to the project and that there have been conversations on the addition of Candace Owens and Ana Kasparian.
“We do things in a very thoughtful way to involve the community and, when we release the Times then, we will then inform the truth” rather than to have speculation written and then ask to respond to speculation, “said Soon Shiong.
Times readers can expect to learn more about Times and three months old, he said.
The editorial committee
The other billionaire project for the Times is to rebuild the newspaper’s editorial committee, a particularly urgent task given to Carla Hall, the last member of the remaining editorial committee of the Times, accepted a takeover last week after 32 years in the company.
Hall’s departure follows the exodus of his peers after Soon Shiong blocked an editorial approving the president of the time, Kamala Harris, for the president at the 11th hour in October. This decision was publicly criticized by readers and staff members of the Times, many of whom ended their subscriptions or left the newspaper for allegations that the owner of the Times folded the knee to Trump.
The owner of the Times previously declared that the former editorial committee “was very on the left” and that a new board of directors should “have someone who will tend to the right, and more importantly, someone who stretched in the middle”. Although the billionaire will still not say who will endow a new editorial committee, he said that “it is time for a renaissance and an invigoration of a next generation of editorial members who recognize the new world as we see it.”
Changes are an attempt to find former subscribers while courting new ones at a difficult time for the information industry. Like Soon-Shiong’s Times, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post lost subscribers for its involvement, hemorragade 250,000 subscribers in October after pro-harris approval was blocked and at least 75,000 in 48 hours last week for its review of the opinion section. Times lost more than 7,000 readers in October, almost 2% of its total subscription base.
The Bezos Wednesday reshuffle of the postal section of the post also left the staff members in a state of rebellion, which can worsen low morale which has precipitated several months and departures of staff at the post. But Soon-Shiong, of which the last months looked like the owner of the Billionaire Post, applauded the moving of X: “Welcome to the Jeff club!”
Already, Soon Shiong claims that he has received calls from former subscribers who seek to submit.
“It is only one day, but, once again, I think I engage all Americans, and the opportunity to have a commitment with young people – young readers – and to create a platform that allows interactivity, connectivity is the best that we can try,” said the billionaire.
But what a day it was.
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