Microsoft AI-Generated Article Recommends Food Bank Visit as Tourist Destination

Microsoft published an AI-generated article that recommended people visit a Canadian food bank as a tourist destination before the company decided to withdraw the piece. According to the post titled “Headed to Ottawa? It was recommended that you watch a baseball game, pay your respects to those who have served their country at a war museum, and visit the Ottawa Food Bank in the “Here’s What You Shouldn’t Miss!” section. On X (once known as Twitter), Paris Marx was the first to raise attention to the story. The section of the article about the food bank that was written by artificial intelligence read, “People who come to us have jobs and families to support in addition to expenses to pay.” “The challenges of life are enough as they are. You might want to consider going into it on an empty stomach.”

Controversial Recommendation Withdrawn by Microsoft

Before it was removed, the story was published on Microsoft Start, the artificial intelligence-powered news aggregator that the corporation launched in 2021 to succeed Microsoft News. After The Verge published a story about the post and its very inappropriate recommendation about “going into it on an empty stomach,” Microsoft senior director Jeff Jones responded to the publication by saying, “This article has been removed, and we are investigating how it made it through our review process.”

Microsoft is really hitting it out of the park with its AI-generated travel stories! If you visit Ottawa, it highly recommends the Ottawa Food Bank and provides a great tip for tourists: “Consider going into it on an empty stomach.” https://t.co/7bvGemDad2

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) August 17, 2023

AI-Generated Content and Microsoft Start

The notice “This page no longer exists” is displayed whenever the original URL is used. A brand-new search page will automatically load for you. Imgur was given access to screenshots uploaded on The Verge’s website.

The fact that the piece’s author was identified as “Microsoft Travel” gives the impression that actual persons were not involved in producing the content in any way. The webpage titled “About Us” on Microsoft Start claims that the company employs “human oversight” for the algorithms that “comb through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content sent by our partners” to assist the company in “understanding dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content, and potential popularity and publishing according to user preferences.” According to reports, the maker of Windows let off approximately fifty reporters from the division in 2020 to transition to AI-generated news.

AI-Generated Content and the Media

Microsoft is not the first firm to get carried away with the use of material provided by AI, and it will be the last. At the beginning of this year, CNET published many artificial intelligence-generated financial explanatory articles riddled with errors. More recently, Gizmodo’s parent company, G/O Media, published an AI-composed essay about Star Wars that was likewise full of mistakes on the site. The article’s deputy editor, James Whitbrook, branded the piece “embarrassing, unpublishable, and disrespectful.” While the Associated Press is proceeding with AI-assisted news coverage with cautious caution, other media outlets, such as the news publishing wing of Microsoft, appear to be more comfortable cashing in on wholly AI-written items, clearing the inevitable wreckage after the fact.