AI article announcing death of former NBA player calls him ‘useless’

MSN published an obituary for former NBA player Brandon Hunter earlier this week after he called the basketball forward “useless.”

The obituary, first spotted by Futurism, was written by “Editor” and was titled “Brandon Hunter Useless at 42.” Although it has not been confirmed by Microsoft, which owns the news aggregator site, reports accuse the story of being AI-generated.

In addition to the offensive title, the writing of the article itself gets worse, as it is nonsensical and riddled with grammatical errors.

The first line reads: “Former NBA player Brandon Hunter, who previously played for the Boston Celtics and the Orlando Magic, has died at the age of 42, as announced Tuesday l “Ohio men’s basketball coach Jeff Boals.”

He continues, describing Hunter’s rise to fame as an “extremely renowned high school” – one word – “basketball player,” pointing to spelling errors and unusual phrasing.

The article states that Hunter played in “67 games” over two seasons and had a “career-high 17 points in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks.”

In fact, Hunter collapsed at the end of a hot yoga session, his loved ones confirmed earlier this week.

He was drafted in 2003 by the Boston Celtics, then played for the Sioux Falls Skyforce. The striker went on to play for various European teams, before retiring from the sport in 2013.

The article was removed Thursday. Microsoft has yet to officially apologize for this distasteful obituary.

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A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement toThe Independent: “The accuracy of the content we publish to our partners is important to us, and we continue to improve our systems to identify and prevent inaccurate information from appearing on our channels. The story in question has been deleted.

This indelicate obituary comes just a few years after more than two dozen MSN news home page curators and editors were fired in 2020; they were allegedly told that they were being replaced by artificial intelligence software, according toThe Guardian.