SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:30PM (2 children)
You must be new. There are quite a few of us around here, that are not even on social media. No Facebook/Amazon/Google/Apple/Microsoft in my house now. Microsoft was the last to go, Google still used through DuckDuckGo, but Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon? Never even started. Some of us even block all that shit at the network level to prevent 3rd parties from loading anything from those companies, and combine that with web browser addons to not even download the scripts in the first place.
Interesting that you would try to paint everybody on this site with the same brush, in the same way that watching a mentally challenged child eat paste is interesting :)
P.S - If you were going for troll, you have to work harder. We have some real experts around here providing competition for you.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 30 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)
I'm also here to say that, just like edIII, I've never used any of the popular social media apps. My main telephone is a landline, and my emergency mobile (cell) telephone is just that... a telephone. No camera, no GPS tracking, no frills, no worries. I don't feel the need to tell everyone what I had for breakfast, what I plan to do this evening, or catch up on the latest gossips of our so-called 'stars'.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @03:40PM
What did you have for breakfast?