Microsoft is Replacing Journalists with Robots

Do you remember msn.com? In 2003, it was the 3rd most popular website in the United States. Now, it seems like it’s been relegated to school and library computers. Whilst MSN has fallen from the lofty heights it once occupied, it still attracts some 1 billion visitors every month. That’s what makes today’s announcement particularly astounding.

“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.”

That’s just 1 staff member of 27 individuals that were told on Thursday that they were about to lose their jobs at Microsoft.  The reason? Microsoft no longer needed humans to curate news articles on their homepage.

PA Media, the contractor employed by Microsoft, were told that this move was “part of a global shift away from humans in favour of automated updates for news.” That sounds rather Orwellian!

The move poses immediate questions. Curators were required to abide by strict editorial guidelines, ensuring that users were not presented with any inappropriate content. This was most salient with regards to “fake news” and other inflammatory or misleading content. Can we expect AI to fact-check any questionable news media? Some platforms, including Instagram and Twitter, have been outspoken in their criticism of fake news. Other platforms, including Facebook, have taken limited action – purportedly in defense of “free speech.” Will MSN become the new frontier of fake news?

In response to Mark Zuckerberg’s apathetic stance on fake news - some satirical news sites began to run ads reporting his purported death. He is, of course, still alive.

In response to Mark Zuckerberg’s apathetic stance on fake news - some satirical news sites began to run ads reporting his purported death. He is, of course, still alive.

The journalists facing redundancy had longstanding experience in the industry and now face a seemingly insurmountable challenge in trying to find jobs elsewhere. However, it is important to recognize that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The team working with Microsoft did not report original stories but just exercised editorial control. Curators represent a very small fraction of the entire journalistic industry. What if we got to the point where AI was writing entire articles? Could this have been written by a robot? (I certainly hope not!) Most importantly, how do we ensure that articles written by AI are unbiased?

The technology has the potential to be usurped by North Korean and Russian troll farms in order to exert massive political influence. After all, if they could churn out thousands of articles every hour, the sheer volume of misinformation would drown out any inkling of the truth.

Many tech companies are already experimenting with uses for AI in journalism – and Google seems to be leading the pack. But does the automation of journalism spell out the extinction of honesty?