Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'
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. The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."
[...] Around 50 contract news producers will lose their jobs at the end of June, the Seattle Times reports, but a team of full-time journalists will remain.
Microsoft sacks journalists to replace them with robots
One staff member who worked on the team said: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."
Also at Business Insider, The Verge, GeekWire, and MSPoweruser.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday May 31 2020, @11:35AM (5 children)
Are they really getting sacked or are their contracts just not getting renewed? There is a difference. The base is still valid tho that they are getting replaced by robots/scripts/ai/algo.
I guess the only interesting part will be if the MSN readers will even be able to notice or tell the difference. If not I guess that this will herald the future for all other such jobs.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday May 31 2020, @02:03PM (3 children)
No, none of the 3 readers will notice.
I mean, come on, needs to be pretty dumb to use msn as your news aggregator... when you have S/N spoiling you with the choice of upstart, Arthur T Knackerbrac and takyon.
Ah, yes, and aristarchus, you'll have to visit the submission queue tho'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:44PM
IE11 still defaults to it
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:38PM (1 child)
That's pretty funny seeing as upstart and ATK are bots that crawl and post stories here (often beating real people to the subs queue). I'm pretty sure takyon is a real person as he is an editor. Also aristarchus is probably real (unless he/she {?} is an alter ego of TMB).
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @03:00PM
Takyon is probably human, after all there has to be some actual soylent in the soylent news. I'm less sure about Aristarchus -- I always saw him as the anti-Tay (the microsoft nazi-bot). Relentless in his postings of antifa-news.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday May 31 2020, @02:39PM
Well, they've been reporting the news [soylentnews.org] for years, why not write it also...
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