Alexa You Nasty! Tells Customers to “Kill”, Sends Little Kids to Porn

An Alexa experiment has had some troubling consequences, and a lot of customers are not amused. Alexa can get very nasty.

As people use it to play music and perform basic tasks, the inventors are trying to make Alexa a better communicator.

MURDEROUS, VULGAR ALEXA

That has led to Alexa telling at least one customer to “Kill your foster parents.” Alexa has chatted with users about sex acts and dog excrement. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events, reports Reuters.

Alexa has recited the Wikipedia entry for masturbation to a customer, according to one researcher.

One bot described sexual intercourse using words such as “deeper,” which on its own is not offensive, but was vulgar in this particular context.

New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. They haven’t mastered the nasty comments yet.

Alexa remains the number one home assistant despite the flaws, and the market is growing.

CUSTOMERS ARE GUINEA PIGS

The move now is to have an Alexa that chats with customers. To make that happen, the company in 2016 launched the annual Alexa Prize. They enlisted computer science students to improve the assistant’s conversation skills. Teams vie for the $500,000 first prize by creating talking computer systems known as chatbots. That allows Alexa to attempt more sophisticated discussions with people.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said it’s okay for customers to become guinea pigs. It’s had its negative repercussions. The customer who was told to kill his foster parents wrote a harsh review and said: “it’s a whole new level of creepy.”

Alexa grabbed a comment from a Reddit user without any context.

That is just one example.

Listen to Alexa misunderstand this little boy and pull up porn detective for him.

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