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Microsoft fires journalists to replace them with robots

2020-06-02T13:22:52.365Z


The editorial management of the news portals of MSN and the Edge browser will be entrusted to artificial intelligence.


Can artificial intelligence do as good a job of curating and prioritizing information as a journalist? That's what Microsoft seems to think. The editorial teams of its news portals, American and British, nearly 80 journalists, have just learned of their dismissal, report Business Insider and the Guardian. They will be replaced by algorithms. "This decision is not related to the Covid-19 pandemic , " said a Microsoft spokesperson. It could have a global reach: Microsoft News portals are present in around fifty countries.

Journalists employed by Microsoft do not write articles. Their job is to manage the news portals of the American giant, a sort of “press review” that we see appearing every time we open a tab in the Microsoft Edge browser or go to on the MSN website. Their audience is therefore massive.

Far from flawless algorithms

In concrete terms, these journalists must manually select which press articles they wish to highlight so that the Internet user has a panorama of the news of the day, from the most serious to the lightest. This human work aims to enhance the most reliable sources of information and original content, with a family tone: Microsoft does not want children to be faced with content that is too violent or explicit when they launch their Internet browser.

By deciding to entrust this curation work to artificial intelligences, Microsoft follows the same path as Google with its Google News service. YouTube and Facebook are also based on algorithms. The result is far from perfect. It is not uncommon to see articles from questionable sources spring from these platforms, when it is not a question of disinformation. The hierarchy also knows failures: at the end of 2018, an article by Ouest-France on the new owner of a Breton hairdressing salon was at the top of Apple News, before the Carlos Ghosn case. Since then, Apple has abandoned the use of artificial intelligence and entrusted the management of its widget to publishers. The result is much better.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-06-02

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