False and bizarre stories are being published by Microsoft on the company’s homepage, MSN.com, which remains one of the world’s most trafficked websites and a place where millions of Americans get their news every day. The use of automation and artificial intelligence over human editors to curate the homepage appears to be behind the site’s recent amplification of false and bizarre stories, according to CNN.
Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI —the creators of the buzzy ChatGPT app — has put it at the forefront of the promising and potentially perilous AI revolution even as the tech giant’s president has publicly lectured on the responsible use of the technology.But the apparent role of AI in Microsoft’s recent amplification of bogus stories raises questions about the company’s public adoption of the nascent technology and for the journalism industry as a whole.
“Not only is this sort of application potentially distressing for the family of the individual who is the subject of the story, it is also deeply damaging to the Guardian’s hard-won reputation for trusted, sensitive journalism, and to the reputation of the individual journalists who wrote the original story,” Bateson wrote in a letter Tuesday to Microsoft President Brad Smith.
2020 was the year, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Wednesday, that the company began transitioning to a “personalized feed” that is “tailored by an algorithm to the interests of our audiences.” Microsoft refused to say how many, if any, human editors still work on curating the site or if it is all done by AI and algorithms.
“We tried to cover everything very fairly from all sides and not take a political stance on topics,” she told CNN.It was sensationalist headlines like these that caught the attention of Ferris Kawar, a father of two and sustainability manager in Santa Monica, California.