acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM News

MSN Fires Journalists, Replaces Them With AI


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Microsoft said the layoffs had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Microsoft has announced that its laying off dozens of journalists, editors, and other workers at MSN and its other news divisions.

Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft announced that it's laying off dozens of journalists, editors, and other workers at MSN and its other news divisions.

While media layoffs are tragically widespread at the moment, Microsoft said that the layoffs had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, The Verge reports. Instead, it's part of the company's push over the last few months to automate journalism: it plans to replace the laid-off workers with news-scanning artificial intelligence.

Algorithmic Curation

Many of the roughly 77 editors and journalists hit by the layoffs helped curate the news stories that appear on the homepage for Microsoft News, MSN, and Microsoft's Edge browser, according to The Verge. Now, AI algorithms will scan the Internet for news articles to highlight, taking the work of deciding which news is important out of human hands.

 

From Futurism.com
View Full Article

 


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account