Microsoft's robot editor confuses mixed-race Little Mix singers

Firm's plan to replace editors with AI backfires after wrong image of musician is published

Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company's artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix.

A week after the Guardian revealed plans to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with Microsoft's artificial intelligence code, an early rollout of the software resulted in a story about the singer Jade Thirlwall's personal reflections on racism being illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member Leigh-Anne Pinnock.