Microsoft’s Use of ‘A.I.’ Has Been an Irresponsible Mess ⇥ techdirt.com

Dan Milmo, the Guardian:

Microsoft’s news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.

The poll, created by an AI program, asked: “What do you think is the reason behind the woman’s death?” Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide.

This is far from the first time something like this has happened at MSN. An obituary published in September appeared to use some basic word substitution, and an August article promoted the Ottawa Food Bank as a tourism attraction — though a Microsoft spokesperson insisted articles are not published without human oversight.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

While Microsoft executives have posted endlessly about the responsible use of AI, that apparently doesn’t include their own news website. MSN is routinely embedded as the unavoidable default launch page at a lot of enterprises and companies, ensuring this automated bullshit sees fairly widespread distribution even if users don’t actually want to read any of it.

If you believe Cloudflare’s data, MSN is the fifty-third most popular domain in the world.