LA Times’ New AI Tool Defended the KKK One Day After Launch

The owner of The Los Angeles Times seems like a real dipshit. A sniveling little coward eager to bend the knee to a wannabe tyrant.

His name is Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a South African billionaire who is neutering one of the nation’s best newspapers just like Jeff Bezos is doing to The Washington Post on the East Coast. Just a couple of rich guys destroying valuable news sources to appease one of the worst presidents in American history.

Soon-Shiong’s version of destroying his own product’s credibility has taken on multiple forms, the most egregious of which is an AI-powered feature tacked onto opinion columns to add multiple perspectives to one person’s opinion. It only took a single day after the implementation for the AI to start sympathizing with the KKK.

The feature is a wildly out-of-touch conservative South African billionaire’s idea of fairness. A writer takes the time to carefully craft sentences to form a logical argument using a mixture of facts and personal perspective. Then a fucking algorithm says the exact opposite of whatever the opinion is. This is fairness, I am very smart.

LA Times’ New AI Tool is Unsurprisingly Problematic

Created by AI company Particle, the “Insights” feature was only up and running for a few hours before it decided to auto-generate a counterargument to an op-ed written by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. And what was the content of the op-ed that the AI was so eager to offer an alternative perspective on? The city of Anaheim’s historical ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

The algorithm designed to mindlessly and carelessly spit out opposing views to “challenge readers” or whatever the fuck bullshit platitudes that billionaire dipshit is trying to sell his readers on auto-generated a defense of the Klan by arguing that in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan rose to power not out of an irrational hatred of non-white European-bred straight Christian men, but because of societal changes.

The AI’s defense of a hate group was only up briefly, but it was up just long enough to be noticed and preserved by New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac. Here’s the AI’s defense of the Klan:

“Local historical accounts occasionally frame the 1920s Klan as a product of ‘white Protestant culture’ responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement, minimizing its ideological threat.”

What’s even wilder is just a day before the AI feature went live, Soon-Shiong published a ghoulish letter to readers wherein he condescendingly claimed that the feature would end the “echo chamber” of news by offering diverse perspectives.

Ah yes, offering such diverse perspectives as “Um actually the KKK were NOT racists, they were just concerned about, you know, societal changes.” This dipshit billionaire probably spent a ton of money to integrate this stupid AI into a legitimate news organization only for it to immediately start dog-whistling racism like a good little Republican.

Considering how quickly the AI defended the Klan, I only have one question about its development: was the AI trained on Stormfront forum threads and Fox News transcripts?