How about this for dystopia? MSN have replaced human news editors with a robot powered by Microsoft artificial intelligence technology. The problem is, it has already begun making racist decisions.
And then, in case you thought the story wasn’t already absurd enough, this:
In advance of the publication of this article, staff at MSN were told to expect a negative article in the Guardian about alleged racist bias in the artificial intelligence software that will soon take their jobs.
Because they are unable to stop the new robot editor selecting stories from external news sites such as the Guardian, the remaining human staff have been told to stay alert and delete a version of this article if the robot decides it is of interest and automatically publishes it on MSN.com. They have also been warned that even if they delete it, the robot editor may overrule them and attempt to publish it again.
Then the article ends on a delicious snippet — that Microsoft itself is concerned about the reputational damage this scheme will cause to its AI technology.
I’m immediately reminded of Microsoft’s disastrous Tay experiment.