Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-takes-all-sorts dept.

Last month, in an interview with The Times, Illy Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, creators of a virtual assistant and satnav known as 'Robin', said that 5% of interactions in their database are classified as "clearly sexually explicit".

Trawling the Internet for evidence of the above I discovered a Reddit forum titled: 'I masturbate to Siri and I feel disgusting'. The poster says he's a 20 year old male, who started talking to Siri sexually as a joke before realising that "it really turned me on."

The phenomenon clearly has farther reaches than one sole forum post. VA creators and chatbot companies predict such interactions and put algorithmic safeguards in place to deter feelings of emotional and sexual attachment from costumers.

Earlier this year one of the key writers for Microsoft's Cortana, Deborah Harrison, revealed at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" regarded Cortana's 'sex life' adding, "That's not the kind of interaction we want to encourage."

+1 Funny and Sad?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:11AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:11AM (#428024) Journal

    It's centrally organized. Communicating with real people, I hear with regards to politics different opinions, and with regards to consumptions I hear different opinions. I even met girls specifically not wanting some men because the men were to posh and too focused on cars, champagne, brands and so on. Believe it or not, there are men and women out there that are more interested in "doing", "being" and "experiencing" than in "buying/seeing" or other forms of consumption.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @01:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @01:10PM (#428083)

    That's an excessive amount of faith given to individuals. Any central organization can have multitudes covering a wide swath while any particular individual is limited. Not to mention you can have hundreds of "Siris". That really doesn't happen in meatspace without conflict.

    For any ills or positives you can attribute to corporations, the same by necessity must apply to individuals.

    I can think of no instances were a corporation takes half of your wealth for deciding to move on. With people on the other hand, the odds are decidedly against you.