Microsoft fired 50 people at MSN News in 2020, then turned the “content” over to an “AI” Chaff Bot that told vacationers to Canada to visit a food pantry while they’re hungry.
This is not surprising. In fact, it’s to be expected. “AI” spew doesn’t cost them anything to post, they can put ads on it, and the audience is people who aren’t smart enough to remove Windows from their PC and get a real Web browser.
Microsoft is barely investing in their products and MSN News isn’t really even a corner case. Windows is decrepit and fading into irrelevance. They fire people tending to that corpse too, but can’t simply turn it over to a bot because bots don’t even know how to answer simple programming questions, much less replace programmers.
(Although many lose their jobs because of a bad economy, and the fact that they only had work because of low interest debt.)
Unfortunately, actual news sites are also looking into the “cost savings” side of Chaff Bot “content”.
The Chaff Bot Problem is helping the Dead Internet Theory along. No humans, just PR firms and Chaff Bot spew.
It’s not quite there yet, but the bots don’t have to sleep and can spew things all over the place that are morbid, stupid, incorrect, and low quality for corporations such as Microsoft to slap advertising on.
The article, which Microsoft removed, about Canada, was so low quality it was essentially a word salad like no human would ever write, cobbled together with random and low quality (even pixelated) images. (The one of the food bank was just a maple leaf.)
What’s also not helping is the fact that real Web browsers that are not designed by billion dollar corporations, are choking on an enormous amount of garbage invented mostly by Google. It’s amazing that SeaMonkey’s view of the Web platform is hardly a few years old, and already so much falls apart. Even trying to keep the Web working in a year under a still-supported version of Firefox ESR starts to become a problem.
The Web must be replaced.
It’s terrifying, depressing, how we all just walk around hitting up the same 5-10 sites, few of which are even people anymore. Most of them hosted on CloudFlare, which is the enemy of your privacy.
It takes no effort to flood the Web with crap, and companies like Microsoft (and their useful idiots) obviously have no reservations about doing it, which is why we need to take our cheese and leave.
It’s really aggravating to see what even the New York Times has decayed into, and they still expect you to pay money to read it. Imagine what happens when they replace Paul Krugman, who is a propagandist, who writes utterly predictable “content”, with a “KrugmanBot” that just blasts how, hey, sure your husband is losing all his hours at Walmart because nobody buys anything anymore while plenty of people are stealing things and setting the place on fire, and the economy under Biden is a miracle.
All day long, miracle. (No sleep. Just miracles, and ads.)
Web 4.0
Miracle. ⬆