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Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

cnbc.com

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Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#2
Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#6
So I've got a new Fermi paradox solution. Once we build a large enough radio telescope we will start receiving a lot of chatter from around the universe. Buried in this will be a "high energy physics challenge" involving a powerful particle accelerator, a superconductor, and some synthetic elements with very large nuclei. After performing this challenge there will be another asteroid belt where Earth used to be, and someone somewhere will get some LULZ when they detect a certain kind of characteristic gamma ray pulse followed by silence.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#7

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

You don't teach children to use Alexa. If Alexa is there they just talk to it.

Putting a device into homes that is voice activated, unlocked and usable by anybody capable of speech carries with it some duty of care not to, you know, tell kids to play with mains power. Amazon don't disagree with this.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#8

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

This is the best answer and the media looks for opportunities to push an agenda. I'd rather Alexa sometimes get things wrong because it is just searching the web than to have it constantly updated with "approved" content.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#10

I fail to see how is this responsibility of Alexa. It's parent's fault for letting children use devices like Alexa. Stupid chatbots will always give stupid answers.

So if you have an Alexa in your house and a child says "Hey Alexa" will Alexa ignore that by default? Aren't you just saying that it's the parent's fault for having an Alexa at all?
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