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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: 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.