Following on June 4's "Microsoft News and MSN Fires Journalists, Replaces Them With AI".
From Futurism, November 2:
The company pumps out trash-tier AI content, then waits until it's called out publicly to quietly delete it and move onto the next trainwreck.
We've known that Microsoft's MSN news portal has been pumping out a garbled, AI-generated firehose for well over a year now.
The company has been using the website to distribute misleading and oftentimes incomprehensible garbage to hundreds of millions of readers per month.
As CNN now reports, that's likely in large part due to MSN's decision to lay off most of the human editors at MSN over the years. In the wake of that culling, the company has redirected its efforts toward AI, culminating in a $10 billion stake in ChatGPT maker OpenAI earlier this year.
And if MSN presents a vision of how the tech industry's obsession with AI is going to play out in the information ecosystem, we're in for a rough ride.
Beyond republishing stories by small, unknown publishers — like the one that infamously called former NBA player Brandon Hunter, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42 in September, "useless" in its headline — Microsoft using a variety of tactics to shoehorn AI into its MSN.
Sometimes it's even generating AI content itself, like when it published and then deleted a bizarre travel guide to Ottawa, Canada that recommended visiting a food bank "on an empty stomach."
"This article has been removed and we are investigating how it made it through our review process," Microsoft's senior director of communications said in the wake of the embarrassment....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:"MSN Fired Its Human Journalists and Replaced Them With AI That Publishes Fake News About Mermaids and Bigfoot"
Should we visit Microsoft News more or less often?
Talk about being torn.
We like journalists and get some of our best ideas from them.
But "MSN: Now With More Bigfoot (and mermaids)" has its own attractions, in a cryptid sort of way....
"How Microsoft is making a mess of the news after replacing staff with AI"
Related:
- "Microsoft’s Own Metaverse Is Coming, and It Will Have PowerPoint" (also Excel!!!) (MSFT; EVIL)
- Infobesity—"The regulatory case against tech giants (continued): Why concerns about information overload could cripple the platform-monopoly model."
Or maybe not. Your call.
