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Alexa's AI Experiment Turns Horrific as Home Appliance Suggests MURDER

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As Amazon continues its push to become one of the most powerful companies on the planet, its Alexa device has been under near constant scrutiny from Americans concerned about their privacy.

And rightly so; just yesterday we reported on a story in which an Alexa owner was able to access 1,700 recordings from another household after Amazon sent him a link through customer service.

Now, just a day after hearing that disturbing story, Alexa has provided us with yet another blunder to wonder about.  As it turns out, Amazon has been running an experiment with Alexa in which users can ask the bot to “chat”.  At this point, Alexa is doing more learning than anything, attempting to mimic the way human beings communicate, backed by an incredibly complex and powerful algorithm.

As with any experiments in the realm of artificial intelligence, there have been concerns.

The project has been important to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who signed off on using the company’s customers as guinea pigs, one of the people said. Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.

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The experiment is already bearing fruit. The university teams are helping Alexa have a wider range of conversations. Amazon customers have also given the bots better ratings this year than last, the company said.

But Alexa’s gaffes are alienating others, and Bezos on occasion has ordered staff to shut down a bot, three people familiar with the matter said. The user who was told to whack his foster parents wrote a harsh review on Amazon’s website, calling the situation “a whole new level of creepy.” A probe into the incident found the bot had quoted a post without context from Reddit, the social news aggregation site, according to the people.

The latter user in the above excerpt was told by Alexa to “kill your foster parents” during one of these chat sessions.

As Alexa’s powers grow, we must be weary of Amazon’s intentions for these datasets and intelligent learning capabilities, lest we wish to find ourselves ruled by robot overlords in our lifetime.

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About the Author:
As a lifelong advocate for the dream promised us in the Constitution, Andrew West has spent his years authoring lush prose editorial dirges regarding America's fall from grace and her path back to prosperity. When West isn't railing against the offensive whims of the mainstream media or the ideological cruelty that is so rampant in the US, he spends his time seeking adventurous new food and fermented beverages, with the occasional round of golf peppered in.




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