Microsoft reportedly has been quietly firing some of its editorial staff and replacing them with artificial intelligence which its own engineers helped to develop, according to new reports. The shift in strategy marks a broader company move toward automation and Artificial Intelligence, an issue stirring debate about how quickly technology is progressing—and how many humans will be lost in the process—within contemporary workplaces.

Highlights:

• Microsoft has replaced a portion of its editorial staff with AI.
• The move affects teams responsible for curating news on platforms like MSN.
• The AI systems were partially developed by Microsoft’s own engineers.
• This change is seen as part of Microsoft’s AI-first business strategy.
• Concerns grow over job security and AI’s role in content moderation.

Microsoft’s broader AI-first approach relies at least in part on this move to replace human editors with AI systems. These news tools — built in part by teams now facing redundancy — are used to manage and publish news content. Critics have long fretted that these systems are efficient to the point of being inhumane, allowing news organizations editor judgements of seasoned journalists to slip in terms of content quality.

Especially noticeable on MSN which puts curated news in human hands. So it now decides what articles are shared in what order and it promotes them across multiple channels. While Microsoft claims this boosts efficiency, many former Microsoft employees and analysts worry machine learning is becoming undertone in jobs that require not only the nuanced understanding of humans but some measure of ethics.

As AI replaces human roles, issues surrounding employment in tech driven industries necessarily come about. Given the move toward automated processes, the ideal workers who drove it there might be forced out by the same innovations they have been clamoring for. This was groundbreaking, but the praxis is as clear as anything I’ve read on here this week in that we need to balance technological progress with social responsibility.