Associated Incidents
The Guardian claims that Microsoft has "deeply damaged" its reputation after an AI-generated poll was discovered running on a Guardian article about a woman found dead in Australia that was also published on Microsoft Start, a news aggregation platform.
The "insights by AI" poll appeared next to the article about the woman, identified as a water polo coach named Lilie James, and asked readers to vote on how she died.
Microsoft later removed the poll. But, the Guardian alleged in its letter that the damage has already been done, as many readers who commented on the article criticized the Guardian and the writer for including the poll --- an indicator that they thought the Guardian was behind the feature, and not Microsoft.
"This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," The Guardian's CEO Anna Bateson wrote in the letter to Brad Smith, Microsoft President and Vice Chair.
"Not only is this sort of application potentially distressing for the family of the individual who is the subject of the story, it is also deeply damaging to the Guardian's hard-won reputation for trusted, sensitive journalism, and to the reputation of the individual journalists who wrote the original story," Bateson wrote.
The publisher has demanded that Microsoft take full responsibility for the blunder and provide assurances that it will not run other AI polls or features alongside Guardian articles without permission. Bateson also asked Microsoft to clearly inform users wherever generative AI is used to create content or wherever it uses information from other news publications.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Messenger that all Microsoft-generated polls on news articles have been "deactivated."
"We are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future," the spokesperson said.