Some 50 editors working for MSN, Microsoft's news operation,
have learned their contracts won't be renewed and their jobs will be performed
by artificial intelligence software, according to multiple news reports.
The contractors hired through staffing agencies Aquent, IFG
and MAQ Consulting were notified May 27 that their services would not be needed
beyond June 30, The Seattle Times reported last week.
There was no mention of artificial intelligence in a
statement provided to TechNewsWorld by company rep Tayor Jerue.
"Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a
regular basis," Microsoft stated. "This can result in increased
investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others.
These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."
All full-time news producers working at MSN, whose duties
are similar to those of the contractors, will remain with the company, the
Times reported.
MSN will use AI to do the jobs of the editors, which include
identifying trending news stories, rewriting headlines, and adding photos and
slideshows to stories, the paper said, citing anonymous sources.
The contractors also planned content, maintained editorial
calendars, and assigned content to partner news websites.
Weird, Boring Stories
"What Microsoft is doing doesn't sound that different
from what Google News does," said Dan Kennedy, professor in the School of
Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.
"The human editors at Microsoft were doing what Google
News has been doing automatically for years," he told TechNewsWorld,
"which is aggregating stories into a page of news."
There have been efforts to use AI to take over some
functions of journalism for quite a few years, but they haven't been all that
successful so far, Kennedy noted.
The Associated Press, for example, uses software to generate
coverage of quarterly earnings reports for about 3,700 companies. In that case,
though, the AP is using AI to broaden its coverage, since it doesn't have the
resources to cover the earnings reports of so many companies.
One experimental approach was to have stringers feed data
about local sports events into a program that then writes a story about the
event.
"It's very limited, and the stories are kind of weird
and boring," Kennedy said. "There is no substitute for the judgment
of a good human editor."
Diminished Journalism
Machine-written stories may not be a good idea from a
journalist's point of view, but media owners bent on reducing payroll may have
a different perspective.
"It's one thing when Google or Microsoft does something
in this area, because you don't think of them as news companies -- but if this
is successful, it could bleed over into real news companies," Kennedy
said.
"That will mean not only fewer jobs for journalists,
but a diminished editorial product," he pointed out, "because you're
eliminating a layer of human judgment."
However, journalists shouldn't be threatened by AI in the
near term, said Kennedy.
"The technology isn't good enough, yet -- but that could
change," he continued. "I suppose it's going to get better, and at
some point it will present a real threat to not only jobs but the whole
philosophy of having human editorial judgment applied to journalism."
Anyone who has had a post deleted by Facebook knows the
pitfalls of using algorithms to make editorial judgments, Kennedy added.
"You can't argue with them. You can't reason with them. You can't get them
to change their mind. The fewer humans you have in the process, the more
diminished the journalism is."
Gaming the AI
Artificial intelligence systems eventually might start
writing stories, but that would be a mistake, said Bill Ostendorf, president of
Creative Circle Media Consulting in Providence, Rhode Island.
"Once it's discovered how the AI is writing a story, it
can be manipulated to hide data or omit it," he told TechNewsWorld.
One area where AI is a journalist's friend, though, is in
processing massive amounts of data. "AI is good at hunting and finding
data in databases," Ostendorf said.
If AI makes any inroads in journalism, it's likely to be
with large news outfits with deep pockets.
"Ninety percent of newspapers don't even have the
resources to do an infographic, so AI is going to be out of their reach,"
Ostendorf noted.
It's common when selling change to the rank and file of an
organization to sell it as a way to help employees do a better job. That's the
case with AI for journalists, too. It's supposed to free them up to do more
high-value stories.
"Developers may genuinely believe their software is
going to make a person's job better," Ostendorf said, "but for
management it's usually about reducing headcount, not making anyone's job
better."
Americans Skeptical of AI
AI performs many journalistic tasks that would go undone
without it, such as writing thousands of earnings reports, wrote business
journalist Mikael Törnwall in a report prepared for multinational networking
and telecommunications company Ericsson, based in Sweden.
"Yet it would be naive to believe that media companies
will not also use technology to cut costs by reducing staff," he wrote.
"In this sense, artificial intelligence is both an opportunity for
journalism and a threat to journalists."
As part of the report, a survey was conducted by Kantar SIFO
of more than 4,000 people in Sweden, South Korea, Brazil, and the United States
about AI and journalism. Of the four nations, U.S. citizens were the most
skeptical of AI.
Asked if algorithms would be choosing all or some of the
news they consumed in the future, 83 percent of South Koreans said yes,
followed by 72 percent of Brazilians, 49 percent of Swedes and 46 percent of
Americans.
The survey group also was asked if software would write
articles in place of journalists. Eighty-one percent of Koreans believed
machines would be writing news stories for them in the future, followed by 63
percent of Brazilians, 53 percent of Swedes, and 47 percent of Americans.
source: technewsworld
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