Microsoft pulls AI-written article telling tourists to visit the Ottawa Food Bank

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https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/17/23836287/microsoft-ai-recommends-ottawa-food-bank-tourist-destination

Microsoft published an AI-generated travel article about Ottawa, Canada that prominently recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank, as spotted by Paris Marx, but it pulled that version of the story after we published this article. The food bank was the No. 3 recommendation on the list, sitting behind the National War Memorial and above going to an Ottawa Senators hockey game.

If you try to view the story at the link we originally included in this article, you’ll see a message that says “this page no longer exists.” “This article has been removed and we are investigating how it made it through our review process,” Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said in a statement to The Verge. The article has also become inaccessible at another link. We’ve uploaded a long screenshot of the full article on Imgur.

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Each section in the article, which was bylined vaguely by “Microsoft Travel,” had a brief text description of what you can expect from the destination. For the food bank, Microsoft’s summary included an astoundingly awful statement given the context of the place it was talking about: “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.”

“Needless to say, this is not the type of messaging or ‘story’ we would ever put out or wish to be included in,” Samantha Koziara, communications manager at the Ottawa Food Bank, said in a statement to The Verge. “The ‘empty stomach’ line is clearly insensitive and didn’t pass by a (human) editor. To my knowledge, we haven’t seen something like this before — but as AI gets more and more popular, I don’t doubt an increased number inaccurate / inappropriate references will be made in listicles such as this. This simply highlights the importance of researchers, writers, and editors… of the human variety.”

Imgur page with a screenshot of the entire article: https://imgur.io/a/fg8mxgy

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