Not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, getting news summarized could be good -- time and money saving. On the other, I currently pay for some expensive news subscriptions, like the Wall Street Journal (hundreds per year). Would I stop paying if I could get the news for free, and if so, is that fair to the businesses of the places that actually pay for the reporters and investigators who produce the stories that the AI harvests? Would those original reporters and news outlets get compensated in some way? And if not, what does that do long-term to the quality of information available without great writers and investigators conducting interviews, challenging people with follow-up questions, and creating the original stories?
Also, if the news in the Windows Widgets and on MSN are any indication of what MS thinks are appropriate sources for news, there is a very, very heavy political bias. There a 5 or 6 left-leaning sources for every 1 right-leaning source, maybe even more than that. So if Copilot aggregates all of that for news, would it be better than any one of them by displaying info from all sources (that would be great), or would it weight them similarly to MSN and its Widgets pane and effectively become another way for manipulating people by only presenting half the facts, the half that supports one political party and opposes the other?
Keep in mind that there are zero news sources without a political bias. That doesn't mean that when MSNBC or Fox presents facts they're wrong. Facts are facts. The problem is that each news outlet only presents a subset of the facts they choose based on what those biased reporters or producers/editors think is important to their readers/viewers. It's the same as the old adage about lies, damn lies, and statistics: facts and statistics can be correct and still paint a distorted picture due to cherry picking, e.g. crime is up but violent crime is down, crime is down nationwide vs. crime is up in the largest cities, etc.
Nothing wrong with MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NYT, or NPR presenting the facts of interest to the left (well, maybe with NPR because it's partly taxpayer funded) or with the NY Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, or Fox News presenting facts of interest to the right. The problem arises when something else comes along CLAIMING to be objective and not equally presenting all facts from all those sources and then amplifying the problem by concealing the bias. At least if I see something on Fox, I know it's probably favorable to the right and if I read it in the NYT, I know it's probably favorable to the left. Or, even worse, AI might let the opinionated voices of the reporters creep into the news summaries and treat those opinions as if it's just citing facts.
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