Robots In, Humans Out At Microsoft’s MSN News

Approximately 50 freelance news editors at MSN will see their jobs vaporize July 1 when they’re replaced by robots, according to a story in the Seattle Times.

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Those journalists had helped punch-up the MSN news site by selecting trending news stories written by reporters at other online news sites.

They also came up with alternative, creative headlines for the content.

And they added fresh supporting photos or slide shows to the stories, as appropriate.

But all that work will now be done by artificial intelligence, according to Seattle Times writer Geoff Baker.

“It’s demoralizing to think machines can replace us,” said an anonymous news editor slashed from MSN. “But there you go.”

In other AI-generated writing news: *Robot Takeover at MSN: No Worry to AI Writing Expert: While Microsoft has turned heads with its decision to replace humans with robots at MSN, Noam Lemelshtrich Latar is nonplused.

He’s dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya and author of “Robot Journalism: Can Human Journalism Survive?”

Latar’s take on Microsoft’s move: The human editors replaced at MSN were engaged in repetitive, easily automated functions like story selection, headline generation and image matching.

Essentially, those editors – unlike highly creative writers – were playing on AI’s home turf, he says.

But when it comes to highly creative editorial tasks, AI currently faces much stiffer competition from humans, Latar says.

“Human creativity is not limited by rational thought,” Latar says. “That’s why the chances of winning the battle against robots are high.”

*Don’t Fear the Robot: Count Analytics India as another journal skeptical of the feared wholesale replacement of writers with robots.

The fact is, news stories generated by AI currently are no match for human stories born from critical thinking, empathy and creativity, according to this piece.

*Oops: MSN’s AI Runs Wrong Photo With News Story: MSN’s much-ballyhooed AI editing system just got dinged for running the wrong photo with one of its curated news stories.

The AI selected the news feature for its probing perspective on racism from Jade Thirwall, a member of the band Little Mix.

But there was one problem: The photo MSN’s AI ran along with the story was wrongly identified as a picture of Thirwall.

Instead, the image depicted one of her bandmembers.

*German Broadcaster Revs Up AI + Automation Lab: Public service radio and TV broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk has added a new lab to help infuse AI into its news operation.

“Machine learning can offer great opportunities,” says Uli Köppen, lead at the lab. “But you really need to have the right use case.

“One of our goals is to regionalize stories — perhaps in an automated, or semi-automated way.”...