How Microsoft is making a mess of the news after replacing staff with AI | Hacker News Reader

How Microsoft is making a mess of the news after replacing staff with AI

cnn.com

74 pointsisaacfrond36 comments

Many people on this site continue to argue that AI has zero effect on jobs.

From the article: “ But in recent years Microsoft has laid off editors, some of whom were told they were being replaced by “automation,” what they understand to be AI.”

So, there, unambiguous and with a negative overall impact. What more do you want as a proof that not only is “AI” killing jobs, the replacement is measurably worse

The blind effect of not being affected... yet.

They were curators mostly

They came for the curators and I stayed quiet because I was better than the curators

…and anyway that’s not a real job, anyone can do it obviously if it’s so easy to automate

I’m sure they can just find another job, and besides they should have been working on getting out of that job given that they saw the writing on the wall. I mean that’s what I did, I was able to switch careers into coding and there’s no reason that everyone else on the planet couldn’t do that

So really it’s their fault and they should have planned for this

I don't think anyone is at "fault" here.

Unbelievable

I don't understand what you want to say. Sorry if I said something that hurt you, wasn't my intention

AndrewKemendo was being sarcastic and their comments about it being “their fault” was a criticism of an assumed attitude held by people making the decisions to fire the curators and editors and replace them with AI. I think AndrewKemendo thought that you missed the point.

I really like the expression "writing on the wall" in that context.

It's already replaced some content writing jobs. More of these will be replaced first. My company uses it for ad copy.

The replacement is measurably worse and the decision makers don’t care.

they don't care because the replacements are 70% as good but cost 90% less

In other words 70% of the value for 10% of the cost.

This is why AI is so hyped now. They all view it as the next bitcoin.

Except AI is actually useful outside of buying drugs.

What are the percentages indicating?

70% as good meaning catastrophically incorrect in 30% of the statements, most of the time? Needing careful reality check every single time?

When it comes to this topic everyone progressive on HN gets conservative real fast. Hilarious.

> Many people on this site continue to argue that AI has zero effect on jobs.

My neighbour works for a large law firm that had decided to eliminate a number of junior positions because ChatGPT is significantly cheaper and "good enough" even if it makes numerous factual errors.

Microsoft is the spammiest of the big tech. Not a surprise then.

>poll next to murdered woman about why she died

>saying Democrats are causing covid

>saying dead basketball player is useless

I mean these seem like problems that could be easily solved by having a human intern read over the AI generated story before it's published.

I don't understand why Microsoft just let an experimental tech run a customer facing site without anyone to at least vet and read over the content

0 respect for customers could be a reason, you also see it in Windows.

Its even strange that they have 200k employees and yet they couldn't even have like 20 people on this site to proof read it? And they expect millions of people to read it. MS leadership keeps making bizarre decisions.

Certainly not the first time Microsoft had made a mess of news. The cesspool of idiots that is MSNBC comes to mind.

> cesspool of idiots

Not necessarily stupid though - Rachel Maddow was a Rhodes Scholar and also earned a dPhil.

I think that in the end AI will create far more jobs than it destroys as these jobs will be to cleanup the mess made by AI

> false and bizarre stories

Seems like procedural text generators arent that far worse from their human “news”writing counterparts.

All the articles are written by human, and the algorithm only takes the responsibility of "curating" articles.

I think it's more bizarre that these kind of stories are actually written by human.

Well, they claim to be written by a human. I would not be surprised at all if someone working for a dubious online news site wrote these articles with ChatGPT and Microsoft's curator AI happily picked them up.

Unlike CNN, which does it the old-fashioned way.