Microsoft's new AI editor illustrates Little Mix racism story with a photo of the wrong mixed-race bandmate

A week after the Guardian reported that Microsoft planned to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with AI, the software illustrated a story about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall's reflections on racism with a photo of her bandmate Leigh-Anne Pinnock. Both women are mixed race. Thirlwall, who had recently attended a Black Lives Matter protest in London, called it out on Instagram: "It offends me that you couldn't differentiate the two women of colour out of four members of a group … DO BETTER!" What she could not have known, according to sources at the company, is that the image had been selected by the AI.

Microsoft's fix was to replace the image. The follow-up problem was harder to solve: the robot editor kept selecting coverage of the incident from external news sites and publishing it to MSN.com. Remaining human staff were told to stay alert and delete the article if the system picked it up, and warned that even if they deleted it, the robot editor might overrule them and attempt to publish it again. Staff had already deleted coverage of the Little Mix error after the AI decided readers would be interested.