Microsoft will not renew contracts to about 50 journalists working on its Msn portal and plans to use artificial intelligence to carry out their duties. The Seattle Times reports. "This decision is not the result of the current pandemic," said a Microsoft spokesman in a statement.
Some employees, speaking under anonymity, said that their work will be replaced by the use of algorithms to identify trending news among those of dozens of editorial partners and to optimize the content by rewriting the titles, adding photographs or slide shows. Until 2013, the Msn portal offered original content and links to news, weather and sports, but in 2014 it launched a version by paying other news sites to redistribute their content.
Today the news service is based entirely on those partnerships without any original production.