Microsoft’s travel guide to Ottawa prominently recommended tourists to visit the Canadian capital’s food bank as a tourist attraction, but the company quickly removed the article titled “Going to Ottawa?” Here’s what you shouldn’t miss,” the food bank was the third recommendation on the list behind the National War Memorial and top recommendation for an Ottawa Senators hockey game.

However, the company points out that the content of this article was not generated by the artificial intelligence now known in the form of large language models powering tools such as the Bing chatbot or ChatGPT, and instead, the article was written through a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review.

“We removed this article and found that the problem was due to human error,” said Geoff Johns, a senior manager at Microsoft. We did not publish the article by Uncensored Artificial Intelligence. We combine the power of technology with the expertise of content editors to bring stories to life. In this case, the content was written by a set of algorithmic techniques with human review, not a large language model or artificial intelligence system. We are working to ensure that this type of content is not published in the future.”

The article appeared before it was removed via Microsoft Start, the company’s AI-bundled news service that replaced Microsoft News in 2021. In 2020, Microsoft laid off journalists at Microsoft News and MSN, replacing them with AI.

And Microsoft wrote on a page about the Microsoft Start program: “Our algorithms comb through hundreds of thousands of content submitted daily from our partners, as we process it to understand dimensions such as freshness, category, topic type, opinion content, popularity potential, and publication according to user desires, and this is coupled with human moderation to ensure that the content you receive What we display aligns with our values and that important information appears prominently in our experiences.”

Each section of the article contains a brief text description of what you can expect at the destination. Microsoft’s brief for the food bank included a strange description given the context of the place it was talking about: “The people who come to us have jobs and families to support, plus expenses to pay. Life is hard enough. Consider going at it on an empty stomach.

Samantha Coziara, director of communications for the Food Bank of Ottawa, said: “The phrase empty stomach clearly didn’t pass by a human editor. We’ve never seen anything like this before, but with the popularity of artificial intelligence, I have no doubt that the number of inaccurate references in lists like this will increase. This highlights the importance of human researchers, writers and editors.”

Other publishers have recently turned to AI to supplement or replace the work of humans, often with poor results. An AI-written article from Gizmodo failed to list the Star Wars films in correct chronological order, and the CNET outlet issued corrections to dozens of error-riddled financial stories. And written with artificial intelligence, while BuzzFeed, like Microsoft, used artificial intelligence to write travel guides.