Traditional jobs have all been under the fear of getting replaced by the new-age technologies. Automation at manufacturing has already cut several jobs and employee unions worldwide have been vocal about the impact of automation on livelihoods. But organizations have always backed such technologies to reduce manpower cost, increase efficiency and cash on profits.
In another development in the future of workspace automation, tech giant Microsoft has recently laid off about 50 journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN subsidiaries and replaced them with AI.
According to a Business Insider report, the layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick 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.
“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”
Although media businesses across the globe have been facing the heat of the coronavirus pandemic due to the lack of advertising revenue, Microsoft has clearly maintained that the layoffs are not related to the pandemic.
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 had launched MSN 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.”
Microsoft has gradually been moving towards AI for its Microsoft News work in recent months, and has been encouraging publishers and journalists to make use of AI, too. Microsoft has 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.
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