NOT EXACTLY HAL 9000: Microsoft Shamelessly Pumping Internet Full of Garbage AI-Generated ‘News’ Articles.

We’ve known that Microsoft’s MSN news portal has been pumping out a garbled, AI-generated firehose for well over a year now.

The company has been using the website to distribute misleading and oftentimes incomprehensible garbage to hundreds of millions of readers per month.

As CNN now reports, that’s likely in large part due to MSN’s decision to lay off most of the human editors at MSN over the years. In the wake of that culling, the company has redirected its efforts toward AI, culminating in a $10 billion stake in ChatGPT maker OpenAI earlier this year.

And if MSN presents a vision of how the tech industry’s obsession with AI is going to play out in the information ecosystem, we’re in for a rough ride.

Beyond republishing stories by small, unknown publishers — like the one that infamously called former NBA player Brandon Hunter, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42 in September, “useless” in its headline — Microsoft using a variety of tactics to shoehorn AI into its MSN.

Sometimes it’s even generating AI content itself, like when it published and then deleted a bizarre travel guide to Ottawa, Canada that recommended visiting a food bank “on an empty stomach.”

I had to stop using DuckDuckGo for research because it generates so many results from Microsoft’s Bing, whose results are weighted towards MSN’s craptaculent AI-generated “news.”