Microsoft Runs Ghoulish AI Poll Next to Article About a Dead Woman
Microsoft Runs Ghoulish AI Poll Next to Article About a Dead Woman
The Guardian wants answers after Microsoft ran a gross AI poll next to one of its articles about a woman found dead in Australia.
The poll in question asked readers if they believed the woman's death to be caused by suicide, murder, or an accident.
Grisly nature aside, I fail to see what's to gain from this sort of interaction. Is it simply to give readers another layer of interaction outside of a comment box?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As The Guardian reports in its own recounting of the incident, the article that Microsoft re-published on its MSN news portal focused on the death of a young 20-something woman in Sydney, whose body was found at the school where she worked as a water polo coach.
In a letter sent to Microsoft president Brad Smith that the newspaper quoted, Guardian Media Group CEO Anna Bateson said the debacle was not only potentially upsetting to the family of the young woman, but that it also poses "significant reputational damage" to The Guardian and the journalists who wrote the article.
"This is clearly an inappropriate use of [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," Bateson wrote in her letter to Smith.
Bateson also demanded Microsoft explain how it plans to compensate its news partners when it uses their intellectual property "in the training and live deployment of AI technologies within your wider business ventures."
In a statement provided to Futurism, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company has deactivated its poll feature and is "investigating the cause of the inappropriate content."
"A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature," the spokesperson continued, "and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future."
The original article contains 461 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Unsurprisingly, police are considering the case as a possible murder — but the classless poll still questioned whether readers thought the woman had died by suicide, murder, or accident. Beneath the question, a disclaimer that the poll was part of the company's "insights from AI" somehow made the tasteless poll even more egregious.
Here's the part about the actual poll.
This has been happening for decades. AI has little to do with it IMO