The AI feature, called Insights, is, for some reason, designed to evaluate the political orientation of opinion articles and then artificially generate countervailing points for the reader’s consumption. As my former boss, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, explains in his introduction to the feature, Insights “offers an annotated summary of the ideas expressed in the piece along with different views on the topic from a variety of sources.”

In this case, the AI responded to a piece by my former columnist colleague Gustavo Arellano, which argued that his hometown of Anaheim shouldn’t forget the KKK’s reign of terror there. The AI Insight then informed readers that, actually, as the New York Times’ Ryan Mac pointed out, the Klan may simply have been “responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement,” which is an objectively insane thing to say about one of history’s most obviously hate-driven movements.

This feature had already been derided for automating one of journalists’ least-favorite editorial imperatives, both-sidesing a story. Now it was automating the revision of history and the dulling the realities of racism, too.