Microsoft’s travel guide to Ottawa, Canada highly recommends travelers visit the Ottawa Food Bank. As Paris Marx discovered Until this article was removed after it was first published. (you can Read the full article here.) A food bank was the number three recommendation on the list, behind the National War Memorial, and above it was going to the Ottawa Senators’ hockey game.
In 2020, we reported on Microsoft laying off Microsoft News and MSN journalists to replace them with artificial intelligence. However, the company says its content wasn’t generated by the AI we’re used to today, in the form of large-scale language models that power tools like Bing chatbot and ChatGPT. Instead, the content of Microsoft’s article was generated by “a combination of algorithmic techniques and human review.” As explained in the statement to The Verge From Jeff Jones, Senior Director at Microsoft:
This article has been removed and the issue turned out to be due to human error. This article was not published by Unsupervised AI. We combine the power of technology with the experience of content editors to bring stories to the surface. In this case, the content was generated by a combination of algorithmic techniques and human review, rather than large-scale language models or AI systems. We are working hard to prevent this type of content from being posted in the future.
“Our algorithms scrutinize hundreds of thousands of content submitted by our partners daily,” Microsoft wrote on its “About Us” page. for the Microsoft Start program. “We process it to understand aspects like freshness, categories, topic types, opinion content, potential popularity, and publish according to user preferences. to ensure that the content we see aligns with our values and that important information stands out in our experience.”
here Ottawa Foodbank website If you’d like to donate, we recently moved to a new location due to an 85% surge in demand since 2019. Support is encouraged, said CEO Rachel Wilson. told CBC in June“Our hope is that one day we will close our doors … to reduce the number of people who need food banks.”
Each section of the article was vaguely signed “Microsoft Travel” and contained a short text description of what to expect at the destination. As for food banks, Microsoft’s summary contained a surprisingly egregious statement given the context of the place being talked about. Life is already hard enough. Consider attending on an empty stomach. ”
“Obviously, this is not the type of message or ‘story’ we send or hope to be included in,” said Samantha Koziala, communications manager at the Ottawa Food Bank, in a statement. . The Verge on thursday. “The sentence ‘I have an empty stomach’ is clearly insensitive and not put through by a (human) editor. As far as I know, I’ve never seen anything like it before. As , there will no doubt be more inaccurate or inappropriate references in lists like this, which simply highlight the importance of different human beings: researchers, writers, and editors.”
Updated August 18, 2:59 PM ET: Added new context from Microsoft to clarify how the article was created.