Dozens of journalists employed by Microsoft have seen their employment come to an end as the software giant is now replacing all the vacancies left by them via artificial intelligence software.
On Thursday, in and around 27 individuals were given the news that they would no longer be needed and that they would effectively lose their jobs after Microsoft made the decision to stop employing humans to select, edit and curate news articles on the company’s homepages.
One of the staff member that has been laid of was recently quoted to have said : “I spent 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.”
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Furthermore, this particular individual also held the fact that this latest decision taken by Microsoft is pretty risky as the existing staff were careful to stick to “very strict editorial guidelines” which ensured that all readers involved were not at all presented with any such material that would otherwise be reported as inappropriate or irrelevant.
While the team that worked on the Microsoft site did not actually report any original stories, rather, it exercised editorial control as it selected stories laid down by other news organizations and edited the content as well as the headlines wherever fit. Such articles then eventually saw hosting on the company’s very own website as Microsoft then shared advertising revenue along with the original publishers.
The journalists that have been sacked as well as those who might be sacked in the future will face an ever difficult task to get back into the game, especially at a time like this where the whole global economy is in recession and more and more companies look towards the prospect of cutting costs.
AI though looks to be growing at a rather alarming pace as tech companies continue with the process of experimenting with it – with the likes of Google even funding investment in projects so as to get a basic grip of how AI works and what its uses are.
