Microsoft recently partnered with the startup Traffic lightsin order to use its chatbots Artificial intelligence in the context of news publishing.
In the partnership, apparently, the Redmond giant is paying the startup a sum of money to sponsor flash news feeda project that was named “Signals“.
According to rumors circulating online, the size of the contract should be “substantial” and should be useful for managing a system that should propose a dozen posts a day, relating to the most important latest news in the world. The co-founder of Semafor, Ben Smithclarified how Signals will be written entirely by journalists who will use Artificial Intelligence to write their pieces.
Microsoft, Semafor and the Signals project: the future of journalism?
Apparently, however, Microsoft’s commitment in this sector does not end here. In recent days, in fact, the company has announced collaborations with various journalists’ organizations, such as the Craig Newmark School of Journalismthe Online News Association and the GroundTruth Project.
This series of partnerships seeks to bring the world of journalism closer to Artificial Intelligence, with the former often seeing the latter as a very dangerous competitor.
In fact, however, the systems used to feed AI with information have proven to be quite controversial. In this regard, just mention the legal problems that Microsoft itself is facing with the New York Times.
Last December, the famous newspaper sued both the company created by Bill Gates and OpenAI, claiming that the AI chatbots of the two companies abused the work of New York journalists.
How will Signals work?
Semafor journalists will focus on breaking news, searching quickly reports and declarations about it online, identifying sources of the news in different languages.
A post on Signals might include perspectives from Western, Chinese or Russian newspapers, for example, with journalists summarizing and contextualizing the different viewpoints, citing sources.
Noreen Gillespiea former Associated Press journalist who was hired by Microsoft three months ago to build relationships with news companies, said how “Journalists must adopt these tools to survive and thrive for another generation“.
Certainly, Semafor offers a solid foundation for the Signals project. The startup, in fact, was founded by the aforementioned Ben Smith, former editor of BuzzFeede Justin Smithformer CEO of Bloomberg Media.