Excerpt from The Verge
A Microsoft travel guide for Ottawa, Canada, prominently recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank, as spotted by Paris Marx until it was removed after this article was originally published. (You can see the article in full here.) The food bank was the No. 3 recommendation on the list, sitting behind the National War Memorial and above going to an Ottawa Senators hockey game.
We reported in 2020 about Microsoft laying off journalists at Microsoft News and MSN to replace them with artificial intelligence. However, the company says its content is not generated by the AI we’re now used to in the form of large language models powering tools like the Bing chatbot or ChatGPT. Instead, the content in Microsoft’s story was generated through “a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review,” according to the company. As explained in a statement to The Verge from Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft:
This article has been removed and we have identified that the issue was due to human error. The article was not published by an unsupervised AI. We combine the power of technology with the experience of content editors to surface stories. In this case, the content was generated through a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review, not a large language model or AI system. We are working to ensure this type of content isn’t posted in future.
“Every day our algorithms comb through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content sent by our partners,” Microsoft writes in the “About Us” page for its Microsoft Start program. “We process it to understand dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content and potential popularity and publish according to user preferences. This is combined with human oversight to ensure that the content we show aligns with our values and that crucial information features prominently in our experiences.”
Click here to read complete article at The Verge.