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Microsoft collaborates with Semafor to utilize AI technology in news

Microsoft has partnered with media platform Semafor to incorporate AI into journalism. Their goal is to disrupt the news industry further following transformations due to the internet. Co-founded by Ben Smith, ex-BuzzFeed News editor, and Justin Smith, former CEO of Bloomberg Media, Semafor aims to use AI to increase efficiency and broaden perspectives in news reporting.

Semafor, backed by Microsoft, is about to launch a breaking news feature called Signals, which claims to provide sophisticated insights on critical news stories as they emerge. Journalists will author these stories but will use Microsoft and OpenAI’s AI tools to research as events unfold. It is yet to be seen if AI can enhance journalism by curating, distilling, and updating news whilst remaining objective and swift.

The operation of AI-aided research remains a mystery with the expectation that an AI bot will scrape, analyze, and aggregate news for journalists to convert into articles. This scraping technique has previously landed Microsoft and OpenAI in a lawsuit with The New York Times, thus OpenAI has begun to explore more legal methods, such as last year’s partnership with Axel Springer media house that aims to integrate news content into ChatGPT.

Potential issues include media organizations blocking AI bots that scrape original investigative pieces, although bots could scrape from the myriad of identical news websites. Semafor also acknowledges the difficulties social media platforms face with unregulated misinformation and it is yet to be seen how an AI tool susceptible to fallacy will discern facts from false information. There are also questions over whether AI will eventually write stories if it can find them in the first place.

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