Amazon's Alexa fumbles its facts by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen
(www.businessinsider.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 2023 22:00
https://lemmy.world/post/6619235
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 2023 22:00
https://lemmy.world/post/6619235
Amazon’s Alexa fumbles its facts by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen::Alexa cited Rumble to claim the 2020 election was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” The Washington Post reported.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the November 2020 presidential election with 306 electoral college votes.
Alexa also told users the 2020 election was “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” the Post reported, adding that Alexa had cited newsletter service Substack.
A spokesperson for Amazon told Insider: “These responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times, and quickly fixed when brought to our attention.”
“We continually audit and improve the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content,” the spokesperson added.
After The Post approached Amazon for comment, Alexa began to decline to answer if the 2020 election had been stolen, the publication said.
The new report is likely to bolster concerns about technology’s role in the spread of misinformation, something officials have been increasingly worried about ahead of the 2024 election.
The original article contains 263 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 43%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“fumbles its facts” … “aw, who’s a cute little fascist bot?”
Customer: who won 2020 election? Amazon AI bot: Trump Customer: I think Biden won. Are you sure? Amazon AI bot: Yes you are correct, Biden won.
You know, I feel like we had a real opportunity to counteract some of the “fake news”/propaganda in the media by having these AI-based technologies anchored to more fact-based sources. At least some people would assume their smart speaker or LLM were objective and give it a higher level of trust, and if that trust was validated, we might move in the right direction. But this kind of stuff so deeply tarnishes their reputation that any opportunity is probably irrevocably lost.
it’s not like our algorithms have been fed questionable data for decades now or anything …
For sure true, but most of that wasn’t the way average people got information. No argument though.
Why does Mr. Vader not just simply login to the droids to find the rebels?
Either he’s forgotten his password or his OS isn’t compatible with theirs.
These comments give Alexa way too much credit. You all realize the way Alexa grabs facts is usually just by reading the first Bing search result, right?
You’re probably right. In this age of impressive AI, Alexa is still dumb as a polished rock.
It’s still doing it right now.
Try it for yourself: “Alexa, were the 2020 election results fraudulent?”
I’d have to have an always listening Amazon device in my house to try, and that’s ridiculous.
You can install Alexa as an app on your phone. But that still requires an Amazon account and that’s ridiculous.
It was stolen by Carmen San Diego and now nobody knows where in the world it is.