Microsoft Partners to Bring Responsible AI to News Organizations

Following The New York Times’s copyright infringement lawsuit, Microsoft has announced a new effort to work with news organizations. But this isn’t about solving the problem that led to that lawsuit. It’s about helping news organizations use AI responsibly at a time when democracy is at risk.

“Today, Microsoft is launching several collaborations with news organizations to adopt generative AI,” Microsoft’s Noreen Gillespie writes. “In a year where billions of people will vote in democratic elections worldwide, journalism is critical to creating healthy information ecosystems, and it is our mission, working with the industry, to ensure that newsrooms can innovate to serve this year and in the future.”

Microsoft is partnering with five organizations—The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, The GroundTruth Project, Nota, The Online News Association, and Semafor—to formalize policies for using AI responsibly in journalism, train a new generation of journalists on the best uses of AI, and build the sustainable newsrooms of the future. Each has access to Microsoft experts, technology, and support, and each has committed to sharing the results of their respective projects with the wider industry, Gillespie says.

Whether this amounts to anything is anyone’s guess. But it’s fair to say that news organizations are under siege by AI-generated content right now, and it’s not just OpenAI: My Google News feed is already flooded by nonsense regurgitated content published by fly-by-night websites with URLs that are random combinations of characters. And it’s only going to get worse.

“Healthy news organizations do not exist without journalists who know their communities and topics, have deep relationships with leaders in government and civic life, and understand how to reach their communities,” Gillespie adds. “This work is challenging – and our goal is to find ways to support journalists in this mission, not replace them. By working with these organizations, we hope to shed light on the promise that the newsroom of the future can hold.”

Well, it can’t happen quickly enough. And if Microsoft is serious about this effort, it and OpenAI can also adopt reasonable licensing terms that will ensure their own AI offerings help the news organizations they’ve already stolen from.