Rankings of the best tourist sites in a city, there are hundreds of them on the internet. But none of them had set out to include the neighborhood food bank on a trip. However, this is what Microsoft did in an article about Ottawa.
The article, written by an artificial intelligence but signed by “Microsoft Travel”, thus proposes ten places to visit in the Canadian capital. And in third position, between a visit to the National War Memorial and a game of the Ottawa Senators (ice hockey team), we find the Ottawa Food Bank, accompanied by a brief explanation of the place: “The organization has been collecting, buying, producing and delivering food to people in need in Ottawa since 1984. Life is hard enough. Imagine having to face it on an empty stomach.”
Copy/paste from other sites
And it only takes a simple internet search to understand that the short paragraph is actually just a copy and paste from the official website of the Ottawa Food Bank. The article was quickly removed by Microsoft – despite a copy being published – telling The Verge that the article “should never have existed” and that an investigation is underway to understand how this article could have gotten through. the necessary verification process. for publication.
By studying the other paragraphs of the article, it is also easy to understand that artificial intelligence is at the origin of this article. For the first place mentioned in the ranking, the Winterlude Festival, there are, for example, many lines present on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the site, as well as the official site of the Canadian government.
As early as 2020, Microsoft has chosen to replace journalists working for Microsoft News and MSN with artificial intelligence. The American giant mentioned the need to reassess the needs of each sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, thus reducing investments in certain poles.
Microsoft is not the only company that has investigated the use of AI in the writing of press articles. In several American newsrooms, such as Washington Post or to Wall Street JournalA tool developed by Google has been in the testing phase for a few weeks and is presented as an “assistant”, insisting the company does not want to replace journalists.
Source: BFM TV
