As reported by The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/17/23836287/microsoft-ai-recommends-ottawa-food-bank-tourist-destination
and
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/artificial-intelligence-microsoft-travel-ottawa-food-bank-1.6940356
In 2020 Microsoft laid off dozens of journalists, in a move to rely on artificial intelligence. Those journalists were responsible for selecting content for Microsoft platforms, including MSN and the Edge browser. A recent tourism article now reminds us of that earlier business decision.
Published last week and titled "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!" the article listed 15 must-see attractions for visitors to the Canadian capital. Microsoft has since removed the article that advised tourists to visit the "beautiful" Ottawa Food Bank on an empty stomach. That appears to be an out-of-context rewrite of a paragraph on the food bank's website. "Life is challenging enough," it says. "Imagine facing it on an empty stomach."
The remainder of the must-see list was rife with errors. It featured a photo of the Rideau River in an entry about the Rideau Canal, and a photo of the Rideau Canal in an entry about Parc Omega near Montebello, Quebec. It advised tourists to enjoy the pristine grass of "Parliament Hills."
The article carried the byline "Microsoft Travel." There is nothing on the page that identifies it as the product of AI. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how the article was generated. While now removed, it is still available via the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230814223742/https://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/travel/headed-to-ottawa-here-s-what-you-shouldn-t-miss/ar-AA1faajY
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2023, @03:46PM (5 children)
Content mills [wikipedia.org] have been a problem with search results for at least a decade but AI almost certainly is making them cheaper and easier to operate. So we can expect the problem to become worse for sure.
The internet as a whole won't become useless. However, web search engines might very well become completely useless.
Search engines sucked before and we still managed to make the web work. Perhaps we should revisit some of the 1990s methods of finding new web sites that were mostly killed off by halfdecent web search: webrings, link sites, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2023, @03:47PM
Ah webrings! That takes me back.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 21 2023, @05:04PM
Content mills? I didn't have a term for them, but yeah, I hate them. I can't count the ones that masquerade as a tutorial to perform some task, but there is no substance to the tutorial.
And, of course, there is little to nothing useful in the article that actually solves whatever problem you were having. Worse, you can find the identical article, often enough, under a half a dozen bylines, on a dozen or more sites. They all suck ass, and they are becoming more prevalent.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 21 2023, @08:40PM
I've been thinking 1980s lately. At some point in the future, the only way to find genuine human interaction will be the BBS. Sure, maybe you'll SSH to it, or it'll be a web page, but it'll be some individual's personal BBS.
Connect a raspi to a wifi access point as a "captive portal" of the AP, no internet connection involved, none of that stuff, just the locals connecting to the local-ish bbs...
300 baud was enough for me in 1984. I did enjoy 1200 baud in the later half of the 80s because I can read faster than 300 baud. Beyond 1200 provides no benefit to humans aside from binary downloads.
Given something that's not a human language like playing tradewars 2000 CLI commands, I could outrun that at 1200 sometimes, but 2400, surely that's fast enough for human CLI.
(Score: 1) by therainingmonkey on Monday August 21 2023, @08:47PM (1 child)
Or perhaps 2000s methods?
StumbleUpon introduced millions of people to things a webring never could.
How do you discover your webring?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2023, @09:38PM
Well, nothing stops us from doing both!
You'd obviously need some sort of directory.