Microsoft Wants More Humans to Build Bots
August 22, 2020
Journalists have feared for their jobs since digital media consumed the field in the late 1990s. While this is not the robot apocalypse, Microsoft decided to downsize its human news staff in favor of AI bots says ABC News in: “Microsoft Cuts MSN News Staffers In Move Towards AI Editors.”
In July, Microsoft laid off an undisclosed amount of MSN news editors. This layoff comes during the COVID-19, when unemployment is at an all time high, Microsoft’s layoffs are not surprising. The company has shrunk its news editors since 2014. To flesh out its news, MSN has partnered with other news sites to redistribute content. These other news sites are, of course, paid.
There are multiple problems with AI software, the biggest being its racial and gender biases. There are many documented cases of dark skinned people being misidentified, such as the most recent case:
“The Guardian reported that the company’s AI software in early June confused two mixed-race singers from the British band Little Mix. MSN mistakenly used a photograph of Leigh-Anne Pinnock for a story about fellow band-member Jade Thirlwall and her personal reflections on racism.
Thirlwall quickly voiced her displeasure on Instagram. ‘@MSN If you’re going to copy and paste articles from other accurate media outlets, you might want to make sure you’re using an image of the correct mixed race member of the group,’ she wrote, adding: “It offends me that you couldn’t differentiate the two women of color out of four members of a group … DO BETTER!’”
It is a really embarrassing mistake for a company like Microsoft to make. How hard is it to collect diverse data sets, not to mention keep some editors on staff to fact check the AI bots? Humans are not perfect and so are their AI bots!
Whitney Grace, August 22, 2020
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