Dozens Of MSN Journalists To Be Replaced By Robots

MSN, Microsoft’s long-standing web portal has already been through many changes, since it was first launched in 1995, as Microsoft Network. For much of the 2000s, it was offering original articles and links to other services, such as weather forecasts and email.

In 2014, it stopped producing stories on its own and started entrusting a staff of editors with the task of selecting, adapting and highlighting stories produced by external media partners.

At the end of June, the Seattle Times reports, it will readjust again, laying off dozens of editors and replacing them with AI algorithms that will identify the best stories, rewrite the titles and find the best photos, effectively automating most of the tasks that had been so far performed by humans.

The decision will send shivers down the spine of many publishing industry professionals, who have long been worried by budget cuts and increasing automation.

“Like all companies, we regularly evaluate our business,” a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement, “this can lead to increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

For Microsoft the cuts will certainly translate into economic savings, although the quality of the information provided could also be undermined by the reduction in human supervision.

As some of the fired employees pointed out, speaking to The Guardian, they were not simply cutting and pasting on MSN’s homepage the stories provided by partner outlets. Some form of editorial responsibility still persisted: the editors made sure, for instance, that the pieces complied with their strict internal editorial guidelines on violent or potentially inappropriate content for younger readers.

They also ensured that the articles submitted reflected a wide range of points of view across the political spectrum and highlighted interesting stories from smaller newspapers that would otherwise go unnoticed.

As some employees will still remain, it might be that, thanks to automation, the newsroom will still be able to perform these tasks with fewer people though, leaving the rest to machines. In a cruel irony, it is possible that the same people who were laid off trained their replacements. “It was all semi-automated for a few months, but now it’s at full capacity,” one of the redundant workers told the Seattle Times, “It’s demoralizing to think that machines can replace us, but they can.”