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Take us to your leader article, O robot!

SHORTLY AFTER the US presidential election Pat Soon-Shiong, chair of the Los Angeles Times, Tweeted about taking steps to “help heal our divided nation through a platform that enables civil discourse”. He announced that "facts should be labeled as 'News'. It is our obligation to ensure that our readers can tell what is News versus just Opinion. Every American’s views should be heard and we will label Opinion as 'Voices'…" So far, so standard. But...

robo-illustraton as described

Dall-E3 refuses to produce images of the Ku Klux Klan. But it did this: a photo-realistic image of a humanoid robot standing on a suburban street at night, lighting a bonfire

Image probably not ©

Then on 26 February the LA Times started running robot-generated "on the other hand..." responses - labelled "Perspectives" - to opinion (or Voices) pieces.

A robot responds to "100 years ago, Anaheim recalled its KKK city council. Why don’t we remember?"

The robot output: * Some Orange County institutions resist renaming public spaces tied to Klan figures. dismissing critiques as 'revisionist' or lacking 'formal proof' of discriminatory policies. For example, Brea school officials defended keeping a Klan-linked school name by questioning the authenticity of historical records. * 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. * Critics argue that focusing on past Klan influence distracts from Anaheim's modern identity as a diverse city, with some residents claiming recent KKK rallies were isolated incidents unreflective of current values.

A robot editorialises

Image maybe not ©

As Laura Hazard Owen of NiemanLab put it:

"The hope, I think, is that the LA Times will appear more objective and unbiased if it presents both sides of an issue. A human writer will present one side of a debate, AI will present the other, and readers, seeing the multitude of perspectives represented, will trust the LA Times more and pay up. Or, politicians from across the political spectrum will recognise that the LA Times is treating them all fairly and never complain about coverage again."

Or, as Margaret Sullivan of Gurdian US, put it: this "looks like a bid to please Donald Trump".

No, it's not going well. One of the first things the robot did was to weigh in with a defence of the Ku Klux Klan (see image). That now appears to have been pulled from the article.

To the robot's credit, it struggled to find an upside to cutting Social Security.

This is, we predict, going to get yet messier.

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* 'Artificial Intelligence' our coverage to date