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The Guardian has accused Microsoft of reputational damage, after it displayed one of its articles alongside an inappropriate AI-generated poll.
Businesses are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate media content, including news, to engage their customers. Now, we’re even seeing AI used for the “gamification” of news – that is, to create interactivity associated with news content.
For better or worse, AI is changing the nature of news media. And we’ll have to wise up if we want to protect the integrity of this institution.
How did she die?
Imagine you’re reading a tragic article about the death of a young sports coach at a prestigious Sydney school.
In a box to the right is a poll asking you to speculate about the cause of death. The poll is AI-generated. It’s designed to keep you engaged with the story, as this will make you more likely to respond to advertisements provided by the poll’s operator.
This scenario isn’t hypothetical. It was played out in The Guardian’s recent reporting on the death of Lilie James.
Under a licensing agreement, Microsoft republished The Guardian’s story on its news app and website Microsoft Start. The poll was based on the content of the article and displayed alongside it, but The Guardian had no involvement or control over it.
If the article had been about an upcoming sports fixture, a poll on the likely outcome would have been harmless. Yet this example shows how problematic it can be when AI starts to mingle with news pages, a product traditionally curated by experts.
The incident led to reasonable anger. In a letter to Microsoft president Brad Smith, Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson said it was “an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI]”, which caused “significant reputational damage” to The Guardian and the journalist who wrote the story.
Naturally, the poll was removed. But it raises the question: why did Microsoft let it happen in the first place?
The consequence of omitting common sense
The first part of the answer is that supplementary news products such as polls and quizzes actually do engage readers, as researchby the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas has found.
Given how cheap it is to use AI for this purpose, it seems likely news businesses (and businesses displaying others’ news) will continue to do so.
The second part of the answer is there was no “human in the loop”, or limited human involvement, in the Microsoft incident.
The major providers of large language models – the models that underpin various AI programs – have a financial and reputational incentive to make sure their programs don’t cause harm. Open AI with its GPT- models and DAll-E, Google with PaLM 2 (used in Bard), and Meta with its downloadable Llama 2have all made significant efforts to ensure their models don’t generate harmful content. […]
More: Do you trust AI to write the news? It already is – and not without issues
Associate professor of regulation and governance, UNSW Sydney
msamba 