Microsoft Removes Peculiar AI Article Recommending Food Bank For Hungry Tourists
Whoops. It turns out that as intelligent as artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots may be, the output still requires the discernment of a human eye. Otherwise, a seemingly insignificant travel article generated by an algorithm could direct readers to visit a local food bank as an “attraction.”
That’s exactly what happened when Microsoft recently published and withdrew an article aimed at tourists visiting Ottawa, Canada.
Titled “Headed to Ottawa? Here’s what you shouldn’t miss!”, the piece recommended going to a baseball game, the war museum, and strangely enough, the Ottawa Food Bank.
This oversight was first spotted by Paris Marx on X (Twitter), though it has since been removed from Microsoft Start—the technology giant’s AI-aggregated news application.
Microsoft is really hitting it out of the park with its AI-generated travel stories! If you visit Ottawa, it highly recommends the Ottawa Food Bank and provides a great tip for tourists: “Consider going into it on an empty stomach.” https://t.co/7bvGemDad2
— Paris Marx (@parismarx) August 17, 2023
“People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay. Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach,” the listing read, with the article being attributed to “Microsoft Travel.”
Those attempting to access the link now will be greeted with the message, “This page no longer exists. A new search page will load automatically.”
Interestingly, as Engadget pointed out, Microsoft Start claims it does employ “human oversight” to look over the output of its algorithms, which are designed to “comb through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content.”
Perhaps, despite the model’s supposed understanding of “dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content, and potential popularity,” more safeguards have to be put in place to ensure it doesn’t insensitively regard food banks as a “tourist attraction.”
[via Engadget and Windows Central, cover image via Illia Bondar | Dreamstime.com]
