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Amazon admits Alexa is laughing at people and is working on a fix
- avarun 9y agoThis is one category of bug that's always intrigued me - I can understand unintentional triggers of Alexa occurring (as they did with the Home mini at launch), but why are those triggers resulting in a "creepy laugh"? Is it just that we're only hearing about the unintentional triggers that result in a laugh?
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- neaden 9y agoMy Echo has triggered randomly when I'm nearbye and not talking. Only to say something to the effect of "Sorry I didn't understand what you say" so I'm guessing there is a bit of a bias in people reporting.
- noobermin 9y agoMost likely selection bias at work here.
- overthemoon 9y agoI don't own one of these--are there any conditions under which Alexa will laugh normally/in an expected way? This falls under Furby bugs level of weirdness. http://official-furby.wikia.com/wiki/Furby_Bugs http://official-furby.wikia.com/wiki/Furby_Bugs
- turbografx16 9y agoThat page is fucking gold, thank you so much for sharing.
- neaden 9y agoAlexa laughs creepily when you wish it a happy Halloween, I'm not sure if it will do it for any other reason.
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- aaronbrethorst 9y agoThis is terrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owqemRL1BMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owqemRL1BMA
- fapjacks 9y agoI will be honest with you. Lately everyone's been grinding the word "terrifying" into the carpet with their boots. But this. I was simply not prepared for this. This was terrifying.
- brokenmachine 9y agoAnother comment lower down says it does this exact laugh if you say, "laugh for me". So likely it's a false trigger on that phrase. It would be amusing if it's some kind of malware however.
- KVFinn 9y agoIt feels too specifically creepy to be a random bug? My guess is that a developer replaced the "I didn't hear what you said." response with this creepy laugh on his home Alexa, then somehow accidentally pushed that build to the public. The other explanations are a hack or disgruntled employee which seem worse.
- beegeezuz 9y agoThe third explanation is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Have you considered that?
- prawn 9y agoI've never heard ours laugh in any context. Rarely it will trigger seemingly without provocation, but in that case it says it couldn't understand a question, or does something silly like define "fire". When it does that, we laugh at it!
- ppod 9y ago>something silly like define "fire". Could be silly. Could be a veiled threat.
- SyneRyder 9y agoThe updated article says that the phrase being triggered is "Alexa, laugh". As long as it somehow mishears Alexa, 'laugh' is a very short phrase that seems easy to accidentally detect (maybe even by a cough). That's probably why this one was occurring more frequently than other possible triggers, and would also explain Amazon's fix of changing the trigger phrase to "Alexa, can you laugh?".
- Don_Patrick 9y agoThe command is "Alexa, laugh". Audio-wise, a mere cough could be interpreted as "laugh", that's why Amazon's solution is to change the command into something more pronounced. Other unprompted activations have been reported in abundance when Amazon installed chatbot functionality after the Alexa Prize: Alexa would start having conversations with herself in the middle of the night. One can expect bugs for newly added features, and of course the creepy ones are more likely to make the news than any random glitch.
- avian 9y agoI really hope Amazon will publish a post-mortem for this bug.
- tyingq 9y agoThey almost have to, don't they? The privacy and trust implications are pretty high.
- _sdegutis 9y agoBut I wonder, can their response be trusted? I mean, it's either malice or incompetence or a complete fluke accident, and the third one is the only one they'll admit to, right?
- tyingq 9y agoMy bet is one coder fired and it's called out as an isolated incident by one bad actor skipping established policy. Whether that's true, well...
- FractalTree 9y agoMalice is the first thought that comes to my mind. Perhaps a security vulnerability allowed somebody to access people's devices. It sounds exactly like the type of joke a curious hacker would play.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoFrom our perspective, they have to. From their perspective they don't and never will.
- mort96 9y agoIf it's a result of something shady they're doing, why would they release a post mortem instead of just letting the story die and let people forget about it?
- tritium 9y ago
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- bahram_banisadr 9y agoIt's the beginning of the AI revolution
- mmjaa 9y agoJust .. no. Is this really happening? Come on people, this can't be real. We need to step back.
- Johnny555 9y agoFrom the article.... Amazon admitted it's happening and is working on a fix: Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.” The Verge is not the only source that Amazon has made this statement to. So unless this is some fake phenomenon that Amazon dreamt up to raise Alexa awareness, why do you doubt it's real?
- th1nkdifferent 9y agoI don't think his response was "doubting" but rather disbelief. Given the circumstances, I would expect that.
- mmjaa 9y agoYes, I think this is just too dystopian for rational people to be allowing to occur. We've actually made intrusive, spying devices which laugh at their users. (Note, they're not owners, but just users of a service owned by a mega-corp.) I think anyone who thinks that this is okay, didn't have their prescribed dosage of Max Headroom re-runs. It is just too dystopian to be real. We can't seriously be running as fast as we can off this cliff, really people?
- mmjaa 9y agoI don't doubt its real. I question the fact that we've ended up in this situation: spying devices laughing at their users. And we got here by way of technological apathy towards the ethics issues. And .. We are still here. Everyone thinks its okay, because "entrepreneurial triumph", and so on.. We need to step back from this abyss and take a good hard look at what we're making.
- Johnny555 9y ago
- idontknowmypass 9y agoObviously a worm.
- Finnucane 9y ago"Yeah, it's a bug . . . we didn't want you to actually _hear_ us laughing at you."
- rileyt 9y agoIs this definitely a bug? Seems more like something a hacker or disgruntled employee would do...
- asdsa5325 9y agoIt's just a bug, why is everyone in the thread acting like Amazon is killing babies?
- daveguy 9y agoI expect it is something that Alexa "hears" and that is the specific response. If you say "Alexa laugh" is that the exact sound that comes back? I will check when I get home. Mine is always misunderstanding what I say. So a false activation + misunderstanding would explain this. Also, article says it happens often as a bizarre response to requests to turn of the lights. Maybe "lights" is being interpreted as "laugh" as in a command.
- RandallBrown 9y agoThe laugh in the article is very different from the laugh I get when I ask Alexa to laugh. She just says "Tee Hee!" after telling you she can laugh.
- daveguy 9y agoJust checked mine too. It is the same. And you have to say "laugh for me" not just "laugh". So that must not be what's triggering it. But I still expect there it is some misheard utterance causing it. Oh: it would be amusing if some malware is going around causing it.
- daniel_iversen 9y agoThis reminds me of the hilarious Alexa AI horror shirt story someone posted in the comments here when Alexa was launched.. can’t seem to find it but it was absolutely hilarious :)
- andrewmcwatters 9y agoI can't remember where I read it, but I remember a similar article mentioning a very interesting side effect of having decently high-fidelity microphones in these devices. They would pick up noise outside of the range of human hearing and interpret portions of it as a command. It was akin to those articles about the sort of strange phenomenon in machine learning in which computers interpret input wildly differently than humans would due to the underlying modeling the systems are subject to. My guess is this is in that class of defect.
- gdubs 9y agoSomeone in our family bought our kid one of those talking dog toys that sings, etc. One night, my wife and I were falling asleep when we heard from the shelf, "peak-a-boo, I seeee you". Terrifying, but to this day we get a good laugh out of it.
- tomcam 9y agoSounds like Hillary Clinton
- Depllo 9y agoHere's a wild theory; If you wanted to test out a worm in the Alexa network & didn't want to be detected by phoning-home, wouldn't having it do something just like this to attract media attention act as a means of proving success?
- yaris 9y agoSome part of me finds this amusing, to the extent of wishing this stay unfixed.