I think people are somewhat misunderstanding what's going on in this story. MSN's AI isn't generating stories wholesale like GPT-3 -- it's selecting other publications' stories from across the web for syndication, but doing it automatically after the company fired the team previously responsible for that curation process in 2020. Unfortunately, this new system is clearly not exercising good judgment about what articles or publications are credible, because of the ridiculous stuff that it's republishing from fake news sites about bigfoot, mermaids, monsters on Mars etc.

I’d like to point out this extends to the actual Windows 11 OS because they relentlessly push National-Enquirer calibre news to users. Want to get something done? Hit Windows key and start searching for that app you want to use—only to be force-fed a bunch of celebrity gossip because it prefix-matches the search term and they want to sell Ad impressions.

I used to have high hopes for some of Microsoft’s innovations like Zune, Windows Phone, connect, Rosalyn—that glimmer of open-source-hope from the Evil Empire.

But it’s obvious now they are not really good at anything in the consumer space anymore: Hopping on the ad bandwagon because that’s what Google does; stealing the OS X taskbar placement for no good reason; turning the OS into the spyware folks used to dread at the turn of the millennium; now we need apps to remove Windows features just to use our computers.

I sometimes think about going from 10 to 11. Thanks for steering me straight.

I was actually considering buying a windows computer instead of a mac (which has it's own set of problems), I'll pass after hearing this.

Buy a Windows computer and then put Linux on it. If you need Windows stuff just boot up a VM. It's the only way to own your hardware and your OS.

I have several Linux computers, I need a native way of running MS Office for work so I need either a Mac or Windows machine. I haven't looked at a local windows VM, is that something I can do legally? Does it mean I need to buy a windows license?

The other option, which I'm lukewarm about is what I think is called Windows 365 where I can pay monthly to access a windows VM in a browser. The challenge is needing constant, good internet access to access trivial stuff like Word.