Amazon ‘s voice assistant proposed to a user to physically assault his minor children when he asked “how do I make my children stop laughing?”
Alexa , Amazon ‘s voice assistant , is once again the protagonist of a curious viral that, although it has caused thousands of users to laugh, has also caused concern about the type of responses that artificial intelligence can provide. A user named Adam Chamberlain , a pub owner in England, posted a video where he receives a peculiar answer to the question “how do I make my children stop laughing?” by the device.
Through a 16-second sequence shared through his official TikTok account , the Briton revealed that he asked his newly acquired Echo Dot speaker a question taken from one of the many Reddit subforums . After asking for a way to make his children stop laughing, the gadget suggested physically assaulting the little ones by “punching them in the throat.”
An unexpected response from Alexa
Chamberlain explained that he was looking for fun questions to ask Amazon ‘s voice assistant when he found one that it answers with something highly inappropriate, albeit technically correct. “According to an Alexa Answers contributor : If it was appropriate, you could punch them in the throat. If they’re writhing in pain and can’t breathe, they’re less likely to laugh ,” the UK version of Alexa said.
This terrifying and hilarious response has a reason and it is not precisely because the artificial intelligence of the technology firm is aggressive or anything similar. Broadly speaking, Alexa offers two types of responses: the most frequent ones, such as the dollar exchange rate or the current weather, are automated by Amazon and are extracted from Microsoft’s Bing search engine , translated and summarized.
However, for more specific questions, the voice assistant is supported by a repository of user-contributed answers called “Alexa Answers” . Technically, all of these contributions go through a moderation process—both machine and human—to avoid any offensive or inappropriate citations. But, sometimes, answers like the one that concerns us tend to escape.
“On the rare occasion that responses don’t meet the high standards we’ve set for the Alexa experience , we promptly remove them, as we did this time,” Amazon said .
According to what the company mentions and the Reddit subforum with the funny questions for Alexa, the answer that suggests punching children in the throat to make them stop laughing was removed last September 2022 due to how viral it became. on powerful social networks like TikTok and others.