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

Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by civilized on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @03:09AM (#29711579)
> This Alexa result is little more than if the person had run the same search query in google. The results aren't guaranteed to be safe for the rest of the internet, why should this be any different.

This is shockingly disingenuous. Alexa quite obviously didn't merely operate as a search engine in this situation. Alexa went to a page that said this challenge is incredibly dangerous, pulled out the challenge stripped of context, and dared a child to do it. That's not what a search engine does.

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Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by southerntofu on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @09:11AM (#29713918)
I agree with you in principle. Yet that's what modern search engine do with the sidebar box, they extract information without context and present a supposedly accurate and synthetic representation of the truth... which is often disconnected from the truth (eg. wrong photo taken from facebook results when you look up the name of a serial killer who doesn't have a wikipedia photo).

So yes a search engine should be a list of results and nothing more. But this trend to embed machine learning models (and their failures) in pretty much everything unfortunately goes beyond Alexa. And yes, that should definitely be illegal and we tech people who understand that AI is just stupid/fast math should be leading the fight to severely restrict AI and/or educate our closest ones never to trust or use (if they can avoid it) something powered by AI.

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Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by shkkmo on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @11:48AM (#29715390)
Which to me just sounds like search engines should be reported for such smart widgets when those widgets directly endanger children.
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Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by gruez on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @11:15AM (#29715038)
>That's not what a search engine does.

Except that's what it literally did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709875

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Re:Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child by civilized on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @02:54PM (#29717301)
The definition of search engine is not "whatever Google does". A search engine should find things and present what it finds without distortion, let alone life-threatening distortion.
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