Microsoft cutting MSN news production workers and replacing them with AI

“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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

I wouldn’t exactly call theses workers journalists.

They weren't doing that already?

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.