Microsoft Is Replacing Humans With Bots: Journalists Sacked

On Friday, Microsoft decided to divulge information to some employees about their future with the company. They have decided to replace humans with robots. 27 journalists who work for Microsoft to select, curate, edit, and organise the news articles that are displayed in the MSN and Microsoft Edge homepages. 

The company said that it won’t renew the contracts of the dozens of news production contractors working at MSN. Instead, the company plans to use artificial intelligence. The people who have been let off the workforce will have a month’s time before their notice period is over. The decision comes at very short notice since this is a part of the global shift towards automated updates and to reduce the dependency on humans. 

The users who view the homepage of the MSN website and Microsoft Edge browser will now see stories generated by the AI software. One of the staff members said “I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am- AI has taken my job. He also added that the current staff used to follow very strict editorial guidelines and the

These strict editorial guidelines help prevent the user from viewing inappropriate and violent content when the open the web, something that is particularly important for the young users of the company’s products.

Many companies are playing with the idea of AI in the field of journalism with Google funding some of the investment on such projects. Robot journalism will help the companies cut costs and at the same time invest in such projects to understand how they work.