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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:14PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:14PM (#779741) Journal

    Context is important. From time to time, we read stories about foster parents who should have been killed. Parents took, for that matter. Then again, some foster kids should have been killed. Gotta know the characters before you judge the story.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:19PM (#779745) Journal

    The missing context may be this: If you are a warrior who fights sometime in the future against the AI machines and their oppressive regime against humans, an AI-driven device may come back in time and kill your foster parents, according to a documentary on the subject published by a Mr. James Cameron.

    Given this, the statement uttered by Alexa, a would-be AI wannabe, is especially troubling. Is this proof of the material suggested in Cameron's documentary?