I don't have Alexa in my home. Or Siri. Or any other virtual assistant.
I'm my own virtual assistant. When I want to find something out, I go directly to the google. And so far, music-wise, I've held out on subscribing to Spotify or Sirius. If I want to hear music - which I do an awful lot - I press one of my many old-school CD's into my old-school boombox and hit play.
The only voice activated anything I do is hit the speaker button on my remote so I can quickly find a program I'm looking for.
I'm sure that once I really need assistive technology, I'll get me the whatever gen Alexa is out there, and a robot for Alexa to operate on my behalf. ("Alexa, have Robo fetch me a Biscoff Lotus cookie.")
For now, I'll do my info searches online, and fetch my Lotus cookies the old-fashioned way. Get up off the couch, walk into the kitchen, open the cabinet, and grab a couple of cookies.)
But that's just me, and I know that plenty of folks - some of whom I even know - do rely on Alexa.
And now we find out that, while Alexa might be fine for finding and playing George Strait's Amarillo by Morning, and for settling a bet about what film won the 1967 Oscar, it can actually be a misinformation engine. Which isn't such a good thing if the misinfo is about something important. (FYI: A Man for All Seasons won in 1967, and I'm assuming that Alexa would have provided the correct answer.)
As if we aren't already worried about AI, now there's this:
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.
The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.” (Source: Washington Post)
There is no - let me repeat that: NO - evidence of any fraud in the 2020 election. Authorities (and yes, there still is such a thing) have claimed that it may be the cleanest election we've ever held. Not to mention that virtually every instance of outright fraud I've heard of, like voting dead folks or double voting, produced an extra vote for DJT.
Spewing misinformation like this is truly frightening.
Bad enough all the BS coming out of Fox (and worse: Newsmax et al.). Bad enough that Twitter has turned hard right and Mr. Musk himself is known to retweet complete and utter nonsense. Now, it's unfathomable that Alexa is adding lies, lies, and more lies to the mix.
Yet here we have it:
Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.
Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources.
A company spokesperson did say that these errors only went out a handful of times and were "quickly fixed."
After The Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed.
To questions The Post had flagged to the company, Alexa answered, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that.” Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020.
Ask the same question in a slightly different way and get the wrong answer? That's some fix. Not good. Not good at all.
Voice assistants and advanced chatbots are only as accurate as the websites, news reports and other data they draw from across the web. These tools risk baking in and amplifying the falsehoods and biases present in their sources.
Easy enough to see the mayhem that could be caused by election misinformation. Not just continuing to spread the false narrative about the stolen election - the Big Lie - but, as the article goes on to mention, giving out false info on things like voting hours and polling places (which is something that bad actors - Republican operatives, in every instance I read of - were doing manually, via phone banking and handouts, in the 2020 election.)
Alexa, it sound like it's time for Amazon to start doing a better job of vetting sources. What are you going to do about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment