News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child. Parent comment

Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by cromka on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @02:26AM (#29711367)
> This Alexa result is little more than if the person had run the same search query in google.

Alexa is made to come off humanoid, "conscious" being, and a child can easily get misled and take its answers (or a dare, in this case) verbatim.

When you interact with a computer/phone/tablet and search something, you understand this is no different than you opening a book and scrolling for answers.

So, as others mentioned, it's down to the appearance.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by southerntofu on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @09:15AM (#29713965)
The same could happen with a Google/Bing search with their "intelligent" results box (or whatever that's called) which also uses ML algorithms to extract information from specific pages and present it out of context. The problem is we should never trust a computer to understand the meaning and context of anything. Ban AI from consumer products and from any system making life decisions, or we're doomed to repeat the same story over and over again.
[ Parent | on HN ]