Microsoft criticized for embedding ‘crude’ AI poll alongside news article
An automatically generated poll that Microsoft inserted into its news aggregation platform along with a Guardian article was “crude” and caused significant reputational damage for The Guardian, the newspaper said on Thursday.
The poll, which was posted last week next to an article about a woman who was found dead in a school bathroom in Australia, asked readers to speculate on the woman’s cause of death. It gave three choices: murder, accident or suicide. The Guardian said the poll was created using generative artificial intelligence, which can generate text, images and other media based on clues.
Anna Bateson, the CEO of Guardian Media Group, wrote in a letter to Microsoft that the poll was “clearly an inappropriate use of genAI.”
“Not only is this type of use potentially disturbing to the family of the person who is the subject of the story, it is also deeply damaging to the Guardian’s hard-won reputation for trustworthy, sensitive journalism, and to the reputation of the individual journalists. who wrote the original story,” Ms. Bateson wrote in the letter on Tuesday, addressed to Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft. Ms Bateson said The Guardian had already asked Microsoft not to apply its experimental technologies to Guardian news articles because of the risks this posed.
A Guardian spokesperson said the poll was “crude” and led commentators on Microsoft Start, the news aggregation platform, to believe The Guardian was to blame. One reader, unaware that Microsoft, not The Guardian, had created the poll, wrote: “This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I have ever seen. The author should be ashamed.” Another commented: “Interrogating the reason behind someone’s death? what’s wrong with you!!”
Microsoft said in a statement that it had deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and that it was “investigating the cause of the inappropriate content.”
“A poll should not have appeared next to an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent these types of mistakes from happening again in the future,” the statement said.
The Guardian statement also criticized Microsoft for leaving the poll up for four days. This was removed on Mondayafter The Guardian contacted Microsoft, the Guardian spokesperson said.
The UK government hosted a summit this week to discuss the long-term safety of artificial intelligence, leading to 28 governments, including China and the United States, agreeing to work together on AI risk management.
But the agreement fell short of setting specific policy goals, and The Guardian and other publishers have called on tech companies to specify how they will ensure the safe use of artificial intelligence. In her letter, Ms. Bateson asked Microsoft to outline how it would prioritize trusted news sources, provide fair compensation for licensing and use of journalism, and provide transparency and safeguards around its technologies.
Matt Rogerson, director of public policy at The Guardian, said tech companies must determine how to handle situations where their use of artificial intelligence goes wrong. Microsoft did not attach a note to the article taking responsibility for the poll, he said.