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.
I agree. That's why we should have mandatory faceID on smartphones/tablets/computers/books, so we can positively identify the user's age before allowing access to it. If you fail the age test, your access will be restricted to kid-friendly websites with curated content.
I'll second this. My 5 year old talks to my father's Google device when we're visiting. We never taught him to -- he just learned from grandpa.
Alexa stripped that context away completely and instead added a timer that discouraged careful consideration. This is an algorithmic failure, regardless of the age of the user. Having this sort of failure in a product that has been explicitly advertised for use by kids looks pretty bad and thus it is unsurprising how quickly amazon acknowledged the error and promised to fix it.
It might be unreasonable to expect Alexa to make the internet safe for kids, but if they want to be included in homes with children, they need to at least not directly make the internet more dangerous for children.
I expect that managing children's safety online will become a key product feature of Alexa in years to come.
They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.
Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.
Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.
Further, what Alexa did is actually even worse than just reading from the open internet, because it only took the "challenge" part and stripped away the context about how dangerous it is.
This is akin to something like, "Alexa, tell me about civil rights" and it quoting Stormfront or some other hate site's take on race, without any other context about what it's reading from.
We are calling out Alexa here but I think the same is true for other voice assistants too. Calling these products 'smart' is so wrong - there is nothing 'smart' about them. That 'smart' marketing has you and nearly everyone else assuming that they are a lot more capable and functional than they really are. Its just voice commands to drive things you would otherwise touch in some way - it has no where near human abilities.
Less magical might be a far better bargain for the platform brands, though. It's literally the face (err, voice) of your brand, and you're fighting a completely adversarial war here. At best, you've got unrelated external data sources that could make it say something stupid, but there's an entire spectrum of bad actors with incentivization to get Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant to say something offensive, scandalous, or hazardous.
So the issue here is less about needing to sanitize the internet for kids, and more about how AI struggles to categorize and summarize content and the dangerous effects that can have.
In the worst case, this means, oh no, they might need to find human moderators to approve content for the pool, or even custom create content. They can afford it.
Not really, you are making huge assumptions about me here. I don't expect Alexa to be smart. I do expect that if a company is going to scrape other people's content to use in their service, it behooves them to do that scraping properly and to not use automation to do it if their automation isn't up to snuff.