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.
Even though I have warned my son, nieces and their friends about Alexa, no one listens.
I can’t wait to hear my son yell from cross the room, “I wasn’t f***ing talking to you, Alexa.” Or one of my wacky nieces calling to tell me that she threw her Alexa device out of her fifth floor window because “Alexa is all in my bizness.”
Oh and the neighbor who thinks that a party is not jumping unless someone gets the hell beat out of them. Brooklyn has plenty of those. Imagine said neighbor’s outrage when the fight is interrupted by NYPD who shows up at their door after getting a call from Alexa.
Oh yeah, this is going to be rich.
The guy laughs…this is funny is it? And what did you tell your child when he asked what a dildo is?
This crap may not have been done intentionally but you can’t tell me the program was not tested before springing it on the public.
And they Laugh about it!! My response would have been to throw it against the wall. Are parents so lazy these days they cannot engage their children without the aid of some technology. When my kids were little I found many toys that were educational in nature. I wouldn’t purchase anything that didn’t have some educational value. Many were school type workbooks and they enjoyed them immensely. Today, parents view the “school” as the only educational venue and have little interest in continuing it at home.
Nowadays many are using technology as babysitters, since it allows them more time for themselves. It’s similar to the days when parents would sit their children in front of the TV. Fortunately for myself, we lived in a home environment which had scores of all types of books. And now, I have about six full-size bookcases full.