After Microsoft replaced journalists with computer programs, they wrote a strange article about travel
Microsoft has taken down an article that told tourists to go to the “beautiful” Ottawa Food Bank on an empty stomach. This was done after the company was made fun of for relying too much on AI to find news.
The title of a book that came out last week was “Headed to Ottawa? “This is something you shouldn’t miss!” The article listed 15 things that visitors to the capital should not miss.
The list was full of mistakes. It had a picture of the Rideau River in an article about the Rideau Canal and a picture of the Rideau Canal in an article about Parc Omega near Montebello, Que. It told people to enjoy the clean grass of “Parliament Hills.”
But the entry from the Ottawa Food Bank got the most jokes in tech magazines and on social media. The food bank was called one of Ottawa’s “beautiful attractions,” and the article put it third on the list.
The majority of the entry is just a description of what the food bank does, but it ends with a strange suggestion:
“Life is hard enough as it is. Think about going into it when you’re hungry.”
That looks like a rewrite of a paragraph on the food bank’s website that was taken out of context. “Life is hard enough as it is,” it says.”Imagine facing it on an empty stomach.”
The headline of the article was “Microsoft Travel.” There is nothing on the page that says it was made by AI, but Microsoft has been cutting people out of its news operations more and more. When the company was asked about how the article was made, they didn’t answer right away.
Multiple news stories at the time said that Microsoft fired a lot of journalists in 2020 so that it could rely more on AI. These journalists were in charge of choosing content for Microsoft platforms like MSN and the Edge browser.
An X user named Paris Marx was the first to point out how strange the Ottawa travel article was. He wrote, “Microsoft is really hitting it out of the park with its AI-generated travel stories!”
Then, a website called the Verge, which focuses on technology and science news, posted an article about it. The Microsoft Travel article was taken down quickly, but you can still find it on an online archive.
The article was written in a strange way, and there were mistakes in geography and an odd suggestion to fast before going to a food bank. It told tourists that Winterlude is a chance to see “North America’s largest snow,” and it said that the Rideau Canal was “naturally frozen.”
The article also gave these points of view:
“The Parliament of Canada is housed in the Canadian Parliament Buildings.”