Maybe it's time for journalists to learn coding - Microsoft sacks MSN employees for AI

[williamcll]

In what is an ongoing trend among internet new providers, companies are now replacing their journalists with computers that could write their own news articles. MSN is the latest to be hit with this change.

Quote

Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft’s MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told that they will be no longer be required because robots can now do their jobs.

Around 27 individuals employed by PA Media – formerly the Press Association – were told on Thursday that they would lose their jobs in a month’s time after Microsoft decided to stop employing humans to select, edit and curate news articles on its homepages. Employees were told Microsoft’s decision to end the contract with PA Media was taken at short notice as part of a global shift away from humans in favour of automated updates for news. Sign up to the Media Briefing: news for the news-makers Read more One staff member who worked on the team said: “I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job.”

 

Some of the journalists now facing redundancy had longstanding experience in the industry, while for others it offered a foot in the door and a job in an industry which has seen wave after wave of cuts. They now face a tough challenge to get jobs elsewhere when the whole industry is looking to cut costs. Other teams around the world are expected to be affected by Microsoft’s decision to automate the curation of its news sites. In common with other news organisations, PA Media is facing tough financial challenges and has had to furlough some staff and ask others to take pay cuts. The company has expanded outside its traditional news agency business, recently buying stock image business Alamy shortly before the pandemic devastated the media industry. A spokesperson for the company said: “We are in the process of winding down the Microsoft team working at PA, and we are doing everything we can to support the individuals concerned. We are proud of the work we have done with Microsoft and know we delivered a high-quality service.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/30/microsoft-sacks-journalists-to-replace-them-with-robots

Thoughts: Years ago journalists made fun of programmers and other blue collar jobs about they are far less paying and not much of a contribution to society. Jump to 2019 now they get mad when twitter tells them to learn coding. This trend of human writers replaced with computers isn't likely to stop, just like the industrial revolution. I couldn't think of ethical concerns about this either.

[Trik'Stari]

I am both amused and concerned. 

[Taf the Ghost]

Bots in comments sections have been a better read than most news writers for about a decade. The AI Overlords were inevitable. 

[SansVarnic]

1 hour ago, williamcll said:

ears ago journalists made fun of programmers and other blue collar jobs about they are far less paying and not much of a contribution to society.

Tables a turning ...

[PlayStation 2]

Something that gives me a good outlook for the future, finally.

[Trik'Stari]

1 hour ago, SansVarnic said:

Tables a turning ...

Fuck it, I'ma laugh.

 

[ARikozuM]

2 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

I am both amused and concerned. 

Only concerned. The protection of the privileged few is nearing full immunity. 

 

It might be too late to even stop this. 

[Trik'Stari]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Only concerned. The protection of the privileged few is nearing full immunity. 

 

It might be too late to even stop this. 

Maybe.

 

I view most modern day journalists as imagining themselves of that privileged few. If I get the chance to witness the people responsible for enabling the horror that is coming realize that they themselves will be on the receiving end as well as all the people they look down upon, I'll be a little less angry about it.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

Maybe.

 

I view most modern day journalists as imagining themselves of that privileged few. If I get the chance to witness the people responsible for enabling the horror that is coming realize that they themselves will be on the receiving end as well as all the people they look down upon, I'll be a little less angry about it.

I won't. Being paid so much to cover so little of reality. It really sickens me that we allowed them to grow and concentrate so much power in the first place. 

 

My only issue with this AI is how it will be trained. Will it remove literally everything leaving nothing for interpretation or will it play the fence game where "meh, I mean, sort of, on the other hand". There will be even less challenge to authority going forward. 

[Tristerin]

Consumer markets mean the consumer rules the market.  There *is* a way to fight this.  

[Trik'Stari]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I won't. Being paid so much to cover so little of reality. It really sickens me that we allowed them to grow and concentrate so much power in the first place. 

 

My only issue with this AI is how it will be trained. Will it remove literally everything leaving nothing for interpretation or will it play the fence game where "meh, I mean, sort of, on the other hand". There will be even less challenge to authority going forward. 

Potentially it could serve to actually do what the news should do, convey information with context, but without slant or bias all too common in the journalism of today.

 

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Freedom of speech is important, but at the same time journalists have become far more powerful than I think the founders realized. There has got to be some way of holding them responsible for lying or misleading the public. Nothing like a "ministry of truth", where things must be approved before they are printed, but at least some form of redress should be applicable to them.

 

For instance, what some journalists did to those kids in DC a while back. The journalists went way over the line in calling for them to be doxxed and harassed, as well as for having their school harassed. And it turns out most of what the journalists said was complete bullshit.

 

Just now, Tristerin said:

Consumer markets mean the consumer rules the market.  There *is* a way to fight this.  

An important thing to remember. Although I can see them selling this on "accuracy without bias" when there is totally bias present.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

16 hours ago, williamcll said:

I couldn't think of ethical concerns about this either.

More than ethical, I have a quality concern. There is no AI capable of good journalism. Therefore, the number of journalists being successfully replaced is an indication of the amount of cklickbait, copy-pasta, regurgitated press release, Twitter-embedding garbage being produced everyday and sent away to spam the world. 

 

Like, we would all be better off if this AI itself was replaced by absolutely nothing, just silence - I really don't need the clutter of Justin Bieber "news" on my way to the webmail login screen. Whether human- or robot-made. 

[Brooksie359]

44 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

Potentially it could serve to actually do what the news should do, convey information with context, but without slant or bias all too common in the journalism of today.

 

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Freedom of speech is important, but at the same time journalists have become far more powerful than I think the founders realized. There has got to be some way of holding them responsible for lying or misleading the public. Nothing like a "ministry of truth", where things must be approved before they are printed, but at least some form of redress should be applicable to them.

 

For instance, what some journalists did to those kids in DC a while back. The journalists went way over the line in calling for them to be doxxed and harassed, as well as for having their school harassed. And it turns out most of what the journalists said was complete bullshit.

 

An important thing to remember. Although I can see them selling this on "accuracy without bias" when there is totally bias present.

I mean there is sorta already something like that on Twitter and YouTube. Anything they think isn't true they autoban it. I mean they banned a biomedical engineering company that talked about one of trumps statements being true because they had a new device that they would put down your throat into your lungs to shine uv light to destroy bacteria or something along those lines. Twitter instantly banned them thinking it was fake new only later to retract it. Also I remember when CNN blackmailed a person threatening to doxx them for making a meme about them with trump wwe slamming them. They ended up regretting it after 4chan reacted and tought them why you never mess with 4chan users. 

[Commodus]

4 hours ago, williamcll said:

In what is an ongoing trend among internet new providers, companies are now replacing their journalists with computers that could write their own news articles. MSN is the latest to be hit with this change.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/30/microsoft-sacks-journalists-to-replace-them-with-robots

Thoughts: Years ago journalists made fun of programmers and other blue collar jobs about they are far less paying and not much of a contribution to society. Jump to 2019 now they get mad when twitter tells them to learn coding. This trend of human writers replaced with computers isn't likely to stop, just like the industrial revolution. I couldn't think of ethical concerns about this either.

This isn't an accurate statement.

 

Microsoft is replacing people who curate and edit articles, not people who write articles.  Now, there are AI projects meant to write articles from scratch, but they're not really ready for situations like this.

 

Also, there are definitely ethical concerns.  You do know algorithms can be biased, right?  Intentionally or otherwise.  One of the main concerns about face recognition is that the AI can have problems detecting non-white faces, frequently because it's trained on skewed data sets.  You could skew an article-curating AI to favor stories on certain subjects, from certain outlets, with particular spins... AI is no guarantee of objectivity.

[RejZoR]

Can someone just assassinate the fucking "Ai" buzzword already. Likeforreal...

[Trik'Stari]

23 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I mean there is sorta already something like that on Twitter and YouTube. Anything they think isn't true they autoban it. I mean they banned a biomedical engineering company that talked about one of trumps statements being true because they had a new device that they would put down your throat into your lungs to shine uv light to destroy bacteria or something along those lines. Twitter instantly banned them thinking it was fake new only later to retract it. Also I remember when CNN blackmailed a person threatening to doxx them for making a meme about them with trump wwe slamming them. They ended up regretting it after 4chan reacted and tought them why you never mess with 4chan users. 

The problem is information overload. By the time a retraction occurs, a significant portion of those who viewed the information will continue behaving as though it is true, and the longer they continue that way, the more deeply believed in the information will be.

 

There's a lot of examples for this.

[Jotoco]

I used to spend hours a day reading news, magazines, papers. That was a decade or more ago. 

 

Now I can't even bring myself to head the titles of the front page of a couple news sites before feeling like I might vomit. 

 

Journalism doesn't exist anymore, it is just trash propaganda one way or another. There is no investigation, no revealing, no fighting the good fight. And also there is no informing without bias. I can't read news about men going to space without political and ideological ideas being shoved down my throat. I can't read Corona vírus news without politics. 

 

Even natural disasters and everyday accidents are reported like Soviet propaganda out of 1984. 

 

I say good riddance, I won't miss you. 

[Shreyas1]

half the news reports I see on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc are all  AP reposts. I'm pretty sure a bot can ( and does ) do that. 

 

A lot of the other "news" articles I see anyways are based on one source ( usually a tweet or the like ) and I feel that eventually bots will take over that anyways. Think about a bot that takes a social media post from a well known person about a current event and uses a template to create an article. It seems very familiar to what current "news" is anyways, and I doubt it would be too hard to execute