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from the make-them-feel-like-your-real-parents dept.
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Saturday December 29 2018, @06:48PM (5 children)
This is something we can disagree about.
AI is, by its definition, supposed to be "intelligent" (whatever that should mean or contain), which is derived from the our human perception, that we are intelligent (which is debatable). The fact that it is artificial merely suggests that we are creating it. You are, at one level arguing on a "fundamental" level and then trying to support it by two subjective values "supposed/must be slave to humanity" and "cannot be allowed...". Those are /your/ values as to what AI may become. It is not necessarily shared by others, nor is your view a fundamental one.
Your expression is more one of "oh no, the singularity may be upon us!". Well, that may or may not be bad; nobody knows. We can only speculate what will happen. Suppose a spaceship lands on our lovely planet. The spaceship is inhabited by robots, who are AIs in a walking and talking metal box. Are we then supposed to enslave them, just because they are of non-biological origin? In fact, learning from them may tell us more about our humanity than we ourselves can manage. Why are you so afraid of something that may be much smarter than you are?
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Sunday December 30 2018, @04:49PM (4 children)
I don't think we should enslave even a microbe if it is not of our creation. But I do think we should maintain a healthy distinction between our human offsprings and the other things that we create. It is considered a sign of psychosis when an adult starts treating a doll as a real person. Treating AI as an equal to actual human IS psychotic.
As far as the singularity is concerned, which is a different issue, there are multiple definitions of it. Some say it has already occurred, some say it has yet to. I agree with the latter, and I will believe singularity has occurred when humanity loses control of the "off" switch.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 30 2018, @09:47PM (1 child)
AI isn't intelligent, it merely simulates intelligence. It's just big computers with huge databases and clever programming. What AI does is not thinking, merely computing.
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(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Sunday January 06 2019, @04:09PM
True for now, but increasingly we aren't actually understanding the logic behind that programming. Just to be clear, I don't think Alexa or Google Home is currently at the risk of doing it, but as we depend more and more on training neural networks over big-data without oversight, who will know when exactly such training hits the point of singularity? The current story already shows that Amazon doesn't have proper oversight over the data it is using to train its program, but as we tailor the programming to create programs, who knows when we will lose oversight over its outcome?
I hope I am making sense.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday December 31 2018, @11:51PM (1 child)
I can't go along with you on that.
No microbial enslavement means no zymurgy, and so no beer, wine, ale, mead, nor cider.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Sunday January 06 2019, @04:04PM
Oh, what I meant with 'our' was 'earthly'. What I meant to say was that we shouldn't enslave even a microbe if it is of alien life-form, i.e. not completely originating from earth.