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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @08:34PM
Seems to me there is room for a lot of good hackery here, pollute the big data with all kinds of "fun" stuff.
Reminds me of a very clever machinist / tool-maker friend. His personal workshop was next to his house and that is where his mynah bird lived. Around the shop (away from his relatively genteel wife) his language was colorful and very creative, to say the least. The result was a mynah bird that cursed in English and at least one Slavic language. Big fun when a politician came his door, he would carry on a loud conversation with the bird about that SOB (who could easily hear it through the door).