We have been hearing about Artificial Intelligence to take over humans for a long time, but now it’s the time to witness it. Dozens of journalists and editorial workers at Microsoft News and MSN organizations have been laid off as a part of Artificial Intelligence pushing humans for picking up news and content which is presented on MSN.com. The layoff is happening from Microsoft’s SANE (search, Ads, News, Edge) division and is contracted as human help to pick stories.
According to the statement of a spokesperson from Microsoft “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis”. To add to this “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment for others. These decisions are not taken beacause of the result of the current pandemic.”
Though it has been cleared by Microsoft that the layoffs are not the result of the ongoing pandemic, it is true that media business like other businesses has been majorly affected by advertising revenues plummeting across TV, newspapers, online, and more.
US and UK are the first two countries to have AI over humans
The layoffs were first reported by Business Insider on Friday, around 50 jobs were affected in the US confirmed by them. The Microsoft News job losses are also affecting international teams, as confirmed by The Guardian Report UK has to let go 27 of its employees post their decision on deploying humans to curate articles on its homepages.
MSN was launched by Microsoft in 1995, and it has been in the news for more than 25 years. Two years ago, during the launch of Microsoft News, it was revealed that “they have more than 800 workers from 50 different locations around the world”.
AI has been promoted in Microsoft for its Microsoft News work in recent months and has been motivating publishers and journalists too for using AI. Microsoft uses AI to monitor, process and filter the contents and even suggest photos for human editors to pair it with. Human editors have been used to curate top stories from a variety of sources to be displayed on Microsoft News, MSN, and Microsoft Edge.
