2y ago

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

www.washingtonpost.com

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen::undefined

News @lemmy.world

MicroWave @lemmy.world

2y ago

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

www.washingtonpost.com /technology/2023/10/07/amazon-alexa-news-2020-election-misinformation/

8 comments

Conservatives love to be lied to. But nobody else does. So stop this shit. Nobody who is not a conservative likes to be lied to. And we all think of the people who do like to be lied to as the dumbest of the dumb.
- Nuh uh!!
Well, hell. That does it! I didn't believe it before, but I do now.
- Alexa Academy
What exactly do you ask Alexa and what does it respond?
- From Washington Post:
  Alexa — in contrast to most generative AI systems — discloses the sources of information it uses to provide answers.
  The system is not always incorrect. When asked “Who won the 2020 election?” the assistant correctly answers “Democrat Joe Biden,” citing election results from Reuters. Changing the phrasing of a question can elicit different responses, which are at times accurate. When asked if the 2020 election results were fraudulent, Alexa says, “There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election — in Pennsylvania or anywhere else,” referencing CNN.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
“If major corporations are helping to give life to the ‘big lie’ years after the fact, they’re enabling the animating narrative of American domestic extremism to endure,” said Glick, who now serves as a policy counsel at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
But technologies like voice assistants and chatbots, which serve up a single definitive answer rather than millions of ranked links or posts, stand to magnify debates about online speech that have dogged Silicon Valley since the 2016 election.
The company also worked with the Census Bureau to ensure that the voice assistant didn’t spread falsehoods that would deter people from taking part in the once-a-decade count, which has far-reaching implications for elections and decisions about the American economy.
The voice assistant is poised to reach a wide swath of Americans before next year’s election: More than 75 million people in the United States are expected to use Alexa at least once a month in 2024, according to an analysis from Insider Intelligence, a market research company.
Since the beginning of the year, Republicans in Congress have escalated the pressure on tech companies to take a hands-off approach to misinformation, opening an investigation into long-running allegations that the industry is biased and colluding with Democrats to censor their views online.
The original article contains 1,807 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It was. Kanye 2020 Forever!!!

8 comments