I use Edge and occasionally take a look at the Microsoft news feed. For about a year, or maybe longer (I’m not sure), there has been a variety of apparently AI-generated “news” about all sorts of family problems (between spouses, siblings, parents and children, children and parents) from all possible angles, where the stories sound fabricated and the pictures look AI-generated.
Here’s an example I came across with this morning as soon as I took a look at the “news”:
I really don’t understand how these things can be published by Microsoft.
I don’t suppose they have fact-checkers, editors and sub-editors like proper news media, unless and until someone reports a problem item (and maybe not then, either).
My guess is that at some point you showed an interest in that sort of topic and Lord Algorithm Almighty saw it, and saw that it was good, and blessed you with a multitude of similar stories you might click on.
My brother is an engineer working for a US company. They use AI on a regular basis with great results. This tool should help people boost their productivity or refine their results, not to generate mediocre stuff.
MSN/Bing etc. aren’t journalistic outfits in their own right. Previously there was MSNBC, but that’s a different thing (and they since split anyway, and it’s no longer a Microsoft service).
What you see in Edge is just a feed of third-party sites, some of which might be good, but the majority of which are clickbait spam sites.
I mean, that’s great, and I don’t disagree you on principle, but unfortunately there are many people and companies in the world who are perfectly happy producing shitty content in exchange for eyeballs and payments.
Microsoft is one of those companies, especially in their consumer-facing side. It’s all ads and paid spam. Good luck convincing some mid-level project manager overseeing the Edge newsfeeds to up their quality and filter out AI… even if it means better news for you, it’s less profit for them.
AI is just a tool that can be used for purposes good and bad, and for every engineer that’s using it to make their product better, there are probably a thousand marketers and CEOs making SEO spam out of it. Google is a cesspool full of AI slopspam now.
You can’t control Microsoft enshittification; you can only choose to opt-out.
Google News used to be really good for this (a news aggregator that allows you to customize your interested topics), but a few years ago they changed the algorithm to allow more junk news / fake news / spam / slop sources to surface to the top, and now it’s just as bad and worthless Sad. I wish there were a better news aggregator resource these days too.
From the source listed in the OP screenshot, I’d guess that this particular “story” was pulled from a moral hysteria currently running around in South American social media. So the Microsoft occurrence is not completely out of thin air, since people are talking about it, but there’s absolutely no substance, relevance, or truth to it, so spreading it is still awesomely irresponsible.
There are some “true crime” channels that have done exactly this, and some of those channels have had more than 1 million subscribers! The stories were obviously fake, especially when Googling the people’s names and their location would turn up absolutely nothing.
Sad. I wish there were a better news aggregator resource these days too.