Former NBA player Brandon Hunter died unexpectedly this week at the age of 42, a tragedy that shocked fans of his career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic in the 2000s. However, Microsoft's MSN news portal published a garbled article that appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence, with the title mocking Hunter as "good for nothing."
"42-year-old Brandon Hunter is good for nothing," this article was quickly criticized on social media. The rest of the brief report was even more confusing, telling readers that Hunter "passed away" after "having critical success as a forward [sic] for the Bobcats" and "playing in 67 games."
Condemnation of the disrespectful article was swift and forceful.
One reader posted: "Artificial intelligence should not be used to write obituaries. The most utopian part of this is that the artificial intelligence that replaces us will be as dull and stupid as this translation, but for rich people, that is enough."
This isn't the first time Microsoft, the main backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has embarrassed itself with AI-generated content on MSN. For example, last month Microsoft released an artificial intelligence-generated travel guide to Ottawa, Canada. The content was equally incoherent. It bizarrely recommended that tourists visit a local charity "food bank" and even asked tourists to go hungry. After criticism, the company removed the bizarre article.
Microsoft senior director Jeff Jones claimed at the time: "This article was not published by unsupervised artificial intelligence. In this case, the content was generated through a combination of algorithmic technology and human review, rather than a large language model or artificial intelligence system."
The full story is that back in 2020, MSN fired its team of human reporters responsible for moderating content published on its platform. As a result, as we reported last year, the platform ended up syndicating a slew of sloppy articles on suspected Bigfoot and mermaid topics, which it removed after we pointed them out.
You might think that these repeated self-inflicted embarrassments would prompt MSN to increase its censorship of the content it shares with its wider audience. However, they don't seem to be doing it. MSN promises on its "About Us" page that it will use "human oversight" to ensure "the content we display aligns with our values." However, judging from some of the materials posted on its website, the credibility of this statement is not high.
Upon closer inspection, these articles are not only of poor quality. It turns out that they are also plagiarized.
Take the article about Hunter's death, for example. Its structure is exactly the same as TMZ Sports' report on Hunter's death, except that the punctuation has been changed and synonyms have been used casually. The result is basically incomprehensible.
Here are the first lines of the TMZ report:
Former Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic player Brandon Hunter has died, Ohio State men's basketball coach Jeff Boles said Tuesday. He is only 42 years old.
Compared with the first line of the MSN version, MSN has obviously made a series of clumsy rewritings, such as changing "player" to "participant" to cover up the act of substituting the following:
Former NBA player Brandon Hunter, who played for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has died at the age of 42, Ohio State men's basketball coach Jeff Boles said Tuesday.
Here are the last two paragraphs of TMZ’s report:
Hunter was an outstanding basketball player from a high school in Cincinnati. He was a star forward for the Bobcats. He was selected to the MAC League first team three times. In his senior season, he led the NCAA in rebounding... He was selected with the 56th overall pick in the 2003 NBA Draft.
In two seasons in the NBA, he played a total of 67 games... In 2004, he scored a career-high 17 points against the Milwaukee Bucks.
After checking, the version released by MSN is obviously a deleted version:
Hunter started out as a high school basketball player in Cincinnati and found great success as a forward with the Bobcats.
Throughout his senior season, he was selected to the All-MAC first team three times and led the NCAA in rebounding. Hunter's professional skills led to him being selected as the 56th overall pick in the 2003 NBA Draft.
It is not difficult to find that some articles on MSN are obviously plagiarized from other publishers. "Pleasure Taylor" was apparently a doctored version of the blog "The Cold Wire". A report about potholes in the UK was a doctored version of a previous article in Autocar. An article about tennis star Novak Djokovic was excerpted from Tennis World.
None of this bodes well for the information ecosystem. As publications rush to replace human editors and writers, AI publishes a flood of content of questionable origin—sometimes by mainstream news sites like CNET and The AV Club—that threatens to further erode public trust in the media.
In other words, accusing an NBA legend of being "good for nothing" the week he died wasn't just a mistake made by a seemingly unsupervised algorithm. It is also a threat to the future of journalism.