
Microsoft cutting MSN news production workers and replacing them with AI - fpoling
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/microsoft-is-cutting-dozens-of-msn-news-production-workers-and-replacing-them-with-artificial-intelligence/
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pixxel
“Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and
use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report.

The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and
pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists.

Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told
the Seattle Times.

Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business.”

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Ozzie_osman
Or, in other words, MSN to be more like Google News or Flipboard or any other
news aggregators out there that selects and ranks news automatically.

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flurdy
Not 'robots'. Automated curation. Rubbish title from the BBC (and the
Guardian).

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throwaway894345
Was going to make a joke but I wonder if robots could make better headlines
than the sensationalist nonsense we are subjected to day in and day out.

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yardie
Rubbish title. They are automating the curating of the news section of MSN.
I'm sur it will turn out swimmingly because most of the curating algorithms
I've encountered so far have done a piss poor job of being informative. We can
expect their AI to be gamed by press releases.

Primary sources still need to work and an AI can't replicate that.

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iso947
More and more news is regurgitated from other sites, or from press releases.
Doesn’t take much for someone to spin a story in one way or another and it’s
all over the world before the journalists have got their shoes on.

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sys_64738
I wouldn’t exactly call theses workers journalists.

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_untra_
They weren't doing that already?

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microcolonel
At this point, most “journalists” could be replaced with robots; many
equivalents already are being replaced.

Make sure to do your job well, because if you do it poorly enough, even fairly
primitive automated systems can do it better. Churnalism is an actual
tractable problem for AI.

That said, this is more AI-replaceable “journalism” from the BBC. Microsoft
isn't actually setting up AI authors for articles, they're just letting AI
delete some.

