Fake news and ridicule of the dead: what’s wrong with Microsoft’s AI news?

TO tech/microsoft-ai-news/index.html”>new cnn report on the MSN ai model’s news aggregation begins with examples of questionable editorial calls, such as highlighting a story claiming President Joe Biden fell asleep during a moment of silence for victims of the Maui wildfires (tech/social-media/biden-maui-video-fake-asleep-falls-sleep-rcna101263″>he did not do it

), or an obituary that inexplicably referred to an NBA player as “useless.” An editorial team made up of humans would probably have detected the problems. But Microsoft’s system, which continues to look more like a social experiment than a useful tool after abandoning human efforts in favor of algorithms a few years ago, did not.

Microsoft Start and MSN are presented as resources for finding current news. But its automated system continues to present or generate content with unnecessarily disturbing language and outright falsehoods, and there is little indication that anyone involved in the process cares. There are no sloppy journalists to blame, no editors with names and faces to take (or even evade) responsibility. It’s just software doing what it’s designed to do, and spokespeople shrug when it goes wrong and say they’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.