
Amazon's Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment - eplanit
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-alexa-insight/kill-your-foster-parents-amazons-alexa-talks-murder-sex-in-ai-experiment-idUSKCN1OK1AJ
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sulam
FTA: “At no time were any internal Amazon systems or customer identifiable
data impacted,” [the company] said.

Hey Amazon, chat transcripts _are_ personally identifiable information.
Stripping them of user ids and declaring yourself in compliance will not hold
up when you have people already being identified by accidentally leaked
recordings.

~~~
SilasX
Really? I'm pretty sure it's common to consider a conversation transcript
anonymous as long as the names are stripped.

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but that seems like a stricter
standard than currently exists for removing PII from transcripts.

~~~
tlrobinson
Uh no. I can't find it now, but there was a famous incident a long time ago
(~2005?) where a major chat service (AIM?) released "anonymized" logs for
research purposes and people were able to deanonymize some of them.

Consider how easily people get doxed based on tiny shreds of information they
post.

~~~
jkaptur
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak)

~~~
tlrobinson
Ah right, it was search logs, not chat logs. I think chat logs would be even
harder to fully anonymize.

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nimbius
as a former enlisted US Army soldier i dont see the issue.

\- we have electronics that insist upon murder constantly. the IFF computer is
a blood-thirsty piece of garbage that wants every tank on the battlefield
scorched and ruined. no no, no firing solutions today my saucy chiquita, today
we let the allied APC through.

\- robots that talk about sex? LT's and bird colonels have been droning on
about our habits and practices whilst on leave since time immemorial. Yes i
get it, shes a hungarian prostitute. Double-bag everything and save the
receipts for the medics when theyre naming your new STD.

~~~
mirimir
> no no, no firing solutions today my saucy chiquita, today we let the allied
> APC through.

But "foe" is obviously the safest default, right? At least, from the IFF
computer's perspective.

~~~
DuskStar
I mean, it kind of _has_ to fail-deadly to be of any use at all - since what's
a tank with no IFF?

~~~
mirimir
"Firing solution ready. Execute?" seems like an unambiguous query. But I know
nothing about this stuff. And I wonder what happens if the operator doesn't
respond. I'm guessing that nothing happens. Because who wants a tank with an
unconscious or dead operator shooting at everything?

~~~
solarkraft
The enemy doesn't - It could still be useful for the own party.

Are they remote-controllable?

It'd be great to get some insight into this.

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ceejayoz
> 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.

Did we learn nothing from Microsoft's Tay?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_\(bot\))

~~~
hnauz
Tay was just SO funny, I wish they had released the source code for others to
follow.

------
IfOnlyYouKnew
At one AI startup, we had what was called "Matthi's Law of Talking Robotics",
after one of the founders:

"Tell me you actually understood these rules!"

The startup didn't make it, and its failure may actually have been connected
to this insistence on being too smart for its own good. But it also never
released half-ass products hurling racist insults or suggesting murder.

~~~
LanceH
If the human race was delayed until it was fully debugged, we wouldn't be here
today. It's a bit arrogant to think that any AI is going to cover everything.
Really, the better the AI, the more troubling edge cases that will exist.

~~~
ams6110
Of course, the debugging of the human race was achieved by getting eaten by
predators.

~~~
behringer
What are you talking about? The human race is still racist :D How would you
expect an AI to _not_ be racist when we can't even fix the problem for
ourselves?

~~~
AstralStorm
It's a feature not a bug, from a certain point of view accurate tens of
thousands years ago.

We do not know of such a feature of thought as adaptive or not given our tiny
timeframes...

Racism or some degree thereof may belong to a set known as evolutionarily
stable strategies. Much like selfishness.

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romdev
I'm less concerned about Alexa _saying_ nonsense than understanding nonsense,
like commands hidden in a popular song or TV commercial with unintelligible
background noise:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16255680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16255680)

------
roywiggins
Trying to convince a chatbot to say rude stuff was the height of comedy when I
was 12! I still can't believe that people keep acting like chatbots are a new
thing. They're as old as ELIZA and people have been talking to crappy chatbots
about murder and sex on instant message platforms for more than a decade.

------
drugme
The way things are going, pretty soon, pretty much everything Alexa and
similar services pick up will be stream-replicated, keyword-indexed,
hashtagged and AI-contextualized for the benefit of the hard-working folks at
your friendly neighborhood police station. Kicking back in their swirly
chairs, with nothing better to do with their time. For, you know, "public
safety".

The sooner we resign ourselves to this fact, the better.

------
ancorevard
What kind of sick content did they train this model on?

~~~
camtarn
Reddit, apparently.

That doesn't seem like it was the best idea...

~~~
PhasmaFelis
They really, really should have seen that coming.

------
rdiddly
Is it me or does this article seem a bit submariney despite itself?

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orthecreedence
I would have preferred "Your foster parents are dead."

~~~
moate
That's after you put in the "Alexa, dial 911. I just murdered my foster
parents" command.

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otakucode
'Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts' Uh... so? Are they implying
that even in the privacy of your own home, with your own property, you should
STILL be so neurotically terrified of sexuality that you dare not even speak
of it? How crippled by their hatred of human nature is the author?

The real interesting point here is all the people offended by a mindless piece
of software. It's really very stunning. Normal healthy human beings only get
offended when it's a person making a judgement that affects them in some way.
The ability for some sounds coming out of a speaker, when it's known they do
not represent any conscious thought of any living person and has no influence
or control over ones own life, to offend someone is probably a sign of mental
illness in the listener.

Can we go the other direction with this? Will we find people looking up to
Alexa as a creative genius? As the most loving parent to ever exist? If an
infinite number of monkeys on typewriters generated Shakespeare, I guess we
need to ask - are the monkeys then Shakespeare? We might figure not since the
monkeys are unlikely to be able to make a repeat performance. But Alexa, oh
she would be full of wonders! Once you've totally abandoned the notion that
the involvement of a conscious mind is relevant, all kinds of things become
possible.

Much science fiction presumes we will engage in grand combat with AI when it
demands respect -- it seems we are much closer instead to thrusting it upon
them and exalting them above humanity before they've even got the capacity to
recognize themselves in a mirror.

~~~
dwighttk
“…even in the privacy of your own home, with your own property…”

Neither privacy nor property are appropriate in that context.

~~~
otakucode
Alexa devices are your property. Your home is where you use Alexa devices.
Both are paramount in this context.

~~~
ilovetux
The devices are your property (probably), but alexa is a web -based service
licensed for your use under a EULA. This is definitely not your property.

