When you can’t trust the news, particularly when it is determined artificially, then there’s a problem.

Microsoft’s popular MSN news feed which turns up as a homepage on millions of devices around the world has been pumping out false and bizarre stories curated by artificial intelligence (AI).

This is causing chaos with the popular news service which millions of people use around the world.

MSN reported that President Biden fell asleep at an event, which was not true, and it is increasingly spewing out a lot of far-right content.

The tech giant founded by Bill Gates employed as many as 800 journalists and editors in 2018, but took the decision to drastically reduce that number and turn to automation. Now its editing is done by AI, which is causing problems.

Good journalists the world over should not be discarded in favour of automation and AI. The news and story telling is innately human and to generate and replicate it by AI loses its essence.

Media houses are turning to AI for news aggregation primarily because it is more cost efficient. However the news should be trusted and AI at this stage is leading to problems

In the Caribbean, media houses have to contend with small, illiterate populations and high operating costs. AI and social media is a ready panacea and media managers with little creativity and know how will turn to AI and automation to get out of their financial predicament. Already readership and advertising dollars are dwindling. Turning to AI will do the profession a disservice.

MSN has already turned to AI generated polls which are causing a lot of head scratching.

The fact is the AI tools used just can’t determine what’s real from what is not and is taking a scatter gun approach.

MSN has sacked many of its editors replacing them with automation.

AI leads to a lack of oversight in the news business. Heeding the outrage caused by erroneous news on MSN, Microsoft said it was now disabling polls on news articles and “ investigating the cause of inappropriate content.”

MSN has published stories about fishermen catching Mermaids in their nets, falsely claimed that Elon Musk had not paid child support to his ex girlfriend Claire “Grimes” Boucher, claimed Mars Rover catches “Dark Beast” roaming the surface of Mars.

According to the analytics service Similarweb MSN attracts nearly a billion readers a month with tremendous SEO reach.

MSN has chosen to ignore human oversight and hence one sees the poor decision making with readers getting taken for a ride. It now has the reputation as one of America’s biggest publishers of fake news.