There's some intern following it around like a Roomba, giving it a kick every now and then to stop it from dragging the dog turd all over the house.Last week we revealed Microsoft is replacing its human news editors with artificial intelligence software. A week later the robot journalist is facing accusations of racism after it confused different mixed-race members of Little Mix.
Staff at MSN have also been told to await the publication of this Guardian article and try to manually delete it from the website, because there is a high risk the Microsoft robot editor taking their jobs will decide it is of interest to MSN readers.
As predicted: Soon after we published a story about Microsoft's misfiring artificial intelligence editor, the robot journalist copied the story about itself from the Guardian onto MSN's system. Human staff have now intervened to override the software and delete the article.
The recently-sacked human journalists at MSN have been told to stop leaking to me about what the robot is doing. If you're a human MSN journalist currently trying to stop the Microsoft's robot reporting on itself then my DM/WhatsApp details are in bio. Confidentiality assured.
I'd hazard a guess that data such as names of people in images are not chosen by AI. They are more likely to have been entered into a photo library database by some minimum wage oik that spends much of the day looking at the clock and waiting for 5pm to come around. Why would MS spend a lot of computing effort identifying someone when the metadata is already supplied? GIGO, etc.
The iOS stock quote ap has been linking to the robojournalist site Simply Wallet. Their stories seem paper thin but one caught my attention. The article announced a company installed a new CEO and investors should be wary about this new guy In the big office. Which was odd because that new CEO happened to be the guy who founded the company back in the last century.
What really happened is the company established co-CEOs (the other guy was also another old timer). In legal filing terms such a transfer is done something akin to “cd CEO; mv founder ..; mv ../co_founder .; mv ../founder .”
The robojournalist only picked up on the last reinstatement transaction and didn’t recognize he was sole CEO a few milliseconds ago. So new guy at the helm. Watch out. Make well informed trades.