Recently, Microsoft announced that it was terminating dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. Instead, the company said, it will rely on artificial intelligence to curate and edit news and content that is presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft's Edge browser, and in the company's Microsoft News apps. Explaining the decision, Microsoft issued a statement to the Verge. The statement reads: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."

Shortly after Microsoft announced it was laying off scores of journalists across its news divisions and replacing them with news-skimming artificial intelligence, it's already in hot water after a clear example of racial algorithmic bias. The algorithm doesn't do any original reporting. Instead, it finds articles on the internet and populates MSN with them. Recently, it confused two women of color from the band Little Mix with each other, The Guardian reports, attaching an image of Leigh-Anne Pinnock to an article about singer Jade Thirlwall. It's an unfortunate illustration of how racism continues to persist within AI algorithms, which are notoriously bad at recognizing people of color.

Recently, Microsoft announced that it was terminating dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. Instead, the company said, it will rely on artificial intelligence to curate and edit news and content that is presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft's Edge browser, and in the company's Microsoft News apps. Explaining the decision, Microsoft issued a statement to the Verge. The statement reads: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."

At the end of May 2020, Microsoft took the decision to sack dozens of journalists in favor of replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI). The journalists and editors fired ran the MSN News website, the automatic homepage of the Microsoft Edge browser. The site doesn't write news itself, but draws news from other sources and splits advertising revenue with the original publishers. It used to be curated by humans, who would select stories adhering to their editorial guidelines and edit articles, photos, and headlines wherever necessary. Now, just a few weeks after replacing those humans with software, robots at MSN News have been accused of racism by UK band Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall, after MSN posted a story of her opening up about the racism she experienced at school, accompanied by an image of fellow Little Mix bandmate Leigh-Anne Pinnock.

Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company's artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix. A week after the Guardian revealed plans to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with Microsoft's artificial intelligence code, an early rollout of the software resulted in a story about the singer Jade Thirlwall's personal reflections on racism being illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member Leigh-Anne Pinnock. Thirlwall, who attended a recent Black Lives Matter protest in London, criticised MSN on Friday, saying she was sick of "ignorant" media making such mistakes. She posted on Instagram: "@MSN If you're going to copy and paste articles from other accurate media outlets, you might want to make sure you're using an image of the correct mixed race member of the group." "This shit happens to @leighannepinnock and I ALL THE TIME that it's become a running joke," she said.