'Brandon Hunter useless at 42', MSN Uses A.I. to Write Obituary for Deceased NBA Player and It Goes Horribly Wrong
I wasn't sure if I should blog this or not. It's not really a situation you want to try and make a bunch of dumb quirky jokes about. Ex-NBA player Brandon Hunter who played in 67 games over 2 seasons, spending time with the Orlando Magic and Boston Celtics, passed away during a hot yoga class last week. Incredibly sad and terrifying story. Really highlights the importance of living every day like it's your last, because you never know when it might be. Fucking scary.
Which is probably why if you're MSN, you shouldn't let AI write your obituaries. You should have a well polished, professional journalist like what you would find at Barstool Sports handle your sensitive stories.
Everybody thinks our jobs are sooooo easy. Like anybody can just post 200 words and 15 pictures of Livvy Dunne and get an easy 100,000 views. Like anybody could just tell ChatGPT to, "write 2 paragraphs about a woman flashing her tits on a plane", and it would be just as good as what a professional blogger could do. Well egg on your face AI fans. If AI is so great, then explain this.
NY Post - MSN, Microsoft’s in-house news aggregation site, sparked outrage after it published an artificial intelligence-powered obituary of former NBA player Brandon Hunter which referred to him in the headline as “useless.”
The news story that MSN published about Hunter’s death bore a headline which read: “Brandon Hunter useless at 42.”
The story has since been removed from MSN’s website, but screenshots are circulating on social media and internet archive sites.
You can't be swapping out the word 'dead' with 'useless'. Gotta be better than that MSN. If you're going to fire a bunch of writers and replace them with AI, you an minimum have to have a human being who understands empathy (also English) proof-read your robot obituary blog. The headline was clearly the worst part, but the article in it's own right is equally ridiculous. MSN has since deleted the post, but luckily someone on Reddit posted it in it's entirety. I've bolded my favorite parts.
Reddit - Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter, who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42, as introduced by Ohio males’s basketball coach Jeff Boals on Tuesday.
Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.
He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season. Hunter’s expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004.
Let's be honest. In reality, AI could absolutely do a lot of our jobs. Barstool actually has it's own AI blogging robot named Karim who's proving just that. But MSN… if you're going to use AI, maybe pay the $20/month for ChatGPT, instead of whatever off-brand free version you're clearly using. That article is complete nonsense.
Nobody in the history of the world has ever referred to an NBA player as an "NBA participant". I don't even know where to begin with the 3rd paragraph of that story - "the 56th general decide?". And how the hell did video games get in there? That article barely qualifies as English.
I went down the Reddit rabbit hole a bit, and some people are speculating that they didn't use AI at all, and that a person who doesn't know English wrote the article in a different language and threw it into Google Translate. That actually would make more since. I know AI is capable of more than this.
But no matter how it happened, we can conclude that AI is dumb, and bloggers are smart + unreplaceable. That's something we can all agree on.