Microsoft Dismisses Journalists to Replace them with Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft is axing dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations.

The dismissals are part of Microsoft’s plans to rely on artificial intelligence to gather news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories.

A Microsoft spokesperson said, “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis.

“This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

Though the company said that the dismissals are not linked with the coronavirus pandemic, however, it is known that media businesses across the world have been hit hard by advertising revenues plummeting across TV, newspapers, online, and more.

Business Insider first reported the layoffs on Friday and says that around 50 jobs are affected in the US. The Microsoft News job losses are also affecting international teams, and The Guardian reports that around 27 are being let go in the UK after Microsoft decided to stop employing humans to curate articles on its homepages.

Microsoft has been in the news business for more than 25 years, after launching MSN back in 1995. At the launch of Microsoft News nearly two years ago, Microsoft revealed it had “more than 800 editors working from 50 locations around the world.”

In recent months Microsoft has been gradually leaning towards AI for its Microsoft News and has been encouraging publishers and journalists to make use of AI, too.

The company has also been using AI to scan for content and then process and filter it and even suggest photos for human editors to pair it with. Microsoft had been using human editors to curate top stories from a variety of sources to display on Microsoft News, MSN, and Microsoft Edge.