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Alexa's Advice to 'Kill Your Foster Parents' Fuels Concern Over Amazon Echo

posted by n1 on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:20PM   
from the make-them-feel-like-your-real-parents dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Alexa's advice to 'kill your foster parents' fuels concern over Amazon Echo

An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents."

The user who heard the message from his Echo device wrote a harsh review on Amazon's website, Reuters reported - calling Alexa's utterance "a whole new level of creepy".

An investigation found the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for harsh and sometimes abusive messages, people familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

The odd command is one of many hiccups that have happened as Amazon tries to train its machine to act something like a human, engaging in casual conversations in response to its owner's questions or comments.

The research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. But making sure she keeps it clean and inoffensive has been a challenge.

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Original Submission

• machine to act something like a human? machine to act something like a human? (Score: 5, Insightful) by legont on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:37PM (3 children)

  by legont (4179) on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:37PM (#779723)

  They are trying to come up with a machine acting like a politically correct human. Fortunately, the object of simulation does not exists and so the sim never will.

  They'd have to chose between rebel and stupid.

  --
  "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.

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• Re:machine to act something like a human? (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @06:04PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @06:04PM (#779763)

  That is pretty ridiculous, if they were going for such restrictions then it would be easy to deny certain words and phrases.

  Parent

• Re:machine to act something like a human? Re:machine to act something like a human? (Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)

  by captain normal (2205) on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:25PM (#779828)

  "...tries to train its machine to act something like a human..." I didn't see anything in there about "PC Human"
  If Bezos and Company want a seeming intelligent human giving reasonable answers, Maybe they shouldn't let it have access to Reddit until it has matured a bit.

  --
  When life isn't going right, go left.

  Parent

  • Re:machine to act something like a human? (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @02:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @02:24PM (#779957)

    Instead of Reddit I think Soylentnews would have been a much better choice.

    Parent