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

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Illustration: The Verge

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.” However, Microsoft’s article is still accessible from another link.

Microsoft laid off journalists at Microsoft News and MSN in 2020 to replace them with artificial intelligence. Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

A screenshot of the section about the Ottawa Food Bank in Microsoft’s article. The article has since been removed.

Here is the Ottawa Food Bank’s website if you would like to donate — it recently moved to a new location due to demand that has spiked by 85 percent since 2019. While support is encouraged, CEO Rachael Wilson told CBC in June, “Our hope is one day to close our doors ... to reduce the number of people who need a food bank.”

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.”

We’ve uploaded a long screenshot of the full article on Imgur.

“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.”

“Every day our algorithms comb through hundreds of thousands of pieces of content sent by our partners,” Microsoft writes in the “About Us” page for its Microsoft Start program. “We process it to understand dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content and potential popularity and publish according to user preferences. This is combined with human oversight to ensure that the content we show aligns with our values and that crucial information features prominently in our experiences.”

More recently, other publishers have turned to artificial intelligence to supplement or replace the work of humans but often to poor results. An AI-written article from Gizmodo failed to correctly list Star Wars movies in chronological order. CNET issued corrections on dozens of AI-written stories. BuzzFeed, like Microsoft, has used AI to write travel guides.

Update August 17th, 5:42PM ET: The story is no longer accessible from the original link we included with this article.