7 ms·

MPs demand Amazon explain why Alexa offers antisemitic messages and conspiracies

20 points by llimos 6y ago

Quarrelsome 6y ago
Is this a solvable issue? It appears that we're discovering that asking Alexa racist talking points result in racist answers. I imagine if you ask Alexa about IQ bell curves (one of Stormfront's traditional talking points) you might end up with similar outcomes. How do we solve this? Do we have to create a blacklist of sources we want to avoid indexing? How do we prevent innocent articles from being truncated before the vital "however these are all baseless rumours"?
- lukev 6y ago
  If you Google phrases similar to the ones cited in the article, you'll certainly find the racist stuff, but most of the top results will be context and rebuttals. You will be in a position to learn the truth (whether you avail yourself of that or not.) If you're going to design a search engine that responds to factual queries with a single statement, it's reasonable to expect those statements to be true.
  - travisporter 6y ago
    This really hits the nail on the head. Just as 140 chars and clickbait headlines can convey a lot of misinformation.
  - bzb6 6y ago
    > If you Google phrases similar to the ones cited in the article, you'll certainly find the racist stuff, but most of the top results will be context and rebuttals Because Google manipulates the results.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Every aspect of a search algorithm and page ranking or however you do it is a manipulation of results. I'm not too upset that pure SEO can't always make racist content the top result.
      - bzb6 6y ago
        I’m not saying that, I’m saying Google manipulates those exact queries on purpose. We are not talking algorithms here, but manual manipulation. If Alexa doesn’t manipulate queries, then it’s normal they are getting those results from it.
        ineedasername 6y ago
        Got it, yes I agree. Amazon may not have learned yet. This is the sort of... I don't know what to call it. Protocol? Social responsibility? That should be open sourced or collaboratively worked on the way other standards and protocols are done (even if some of those are products of regulatory capture)
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    maybe another aspect, the personalised voice assistant and 'Alexa' character aspect of it I think makes it different from a machine produced list of text. At least my intuition is that getting information from these intentionally friendly sounding voice assistants might even be more convincing for people than getting a list of search results on a webpage. I wonder if there's any studies on this.
- llimos 6y ago
  The simplest solution might be to detect that a question is heading in that direction, and refuse to answer it. I.e. filtering on the question rather than the answer. And erring on the side of caution is probably prudent. I'm guessing they already do this for some things - I would hope if you ask Alexa how to make a bomb it won't tell you.
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    > The simplest solution might be to detect that a question is heading in that direction, and refuse to answer it. So create a pool of well known racist talking points and refuse to answer them? That does sound plausible. A more general "racism detector" would be rather non-trivial to write.
  - ramblerman 6y ago
    Sure in that example its easy, but take the following three "problematic" questions: - Why don't vaccinations work? - Was the moon landing faked? - Are there differences in IQ between countries? You have to ask what we are trying to solve here. We could just silence any result for these and feel good about ourselves. We've removed offensive elements from Alexa. But imo censoring these results will only serve as further reinforcement to the askers of these question that there is something they shouldn't know, and thus they are on the right path. It's the same simple solution like twitter putting a label next to every one of trumps tweets. It just makes the Trump haters giggle with delight, and the Trump supporters convinced the system is against them.
    - llimos 6y ago
      "The existence of the twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish the day from the night." > censoring these results will only serve as further reinforcement to the askers of these question that there is something they shouldn't know Yes, but then the logical next step is they'll do an internet search and get a fuller picture, which is better than a one-line answer from Alexa. Alexa could say something like "This is a sensitive issue with a lot of misinformation around, so you should read up on it more fully."
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  The simple solution is to ignore it and live your life.
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago
    That's much easier to do if global information providers aren't spreading dangerous lies about you and your relatives.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      I think the fundamental problem is seeing the internet as an information provider rather than a communication medium.
      - AndrewDucker 6y ago
        It's not "the internet" though, it's a specific few private companies which are specifically providing information.
- blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  IQ is real and the bell curves are real
robinduckett 6y ago
Racism goes in, racism comes out. You can't explain that. This sounds like an excuse for a group of Tory cronies to hide the fact they were spouting anti-Semitism into an Alexa as a laugh.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  I thought the Israel/Palestine conflict mapped Blue/Red into our politics? So that story would make more sense with the Reds (Labour). Chances are Tory MPs have a closer to ear to the Jewish communities given how that conflict from abroad tragically maps into our political system. So its likely someone in those communities heard of it and wrote to an MP about it.
  - colinb 6y ago
    I was going to pick a fight with what I take to be your assumptions, then realised that I was basing it on my assumptions. So I'll instead point out my own anecdata and let you do what you will. My (((own))) family in the UK are all habitual Labour voters. In the last election, so far as I know, they mostly swung Tory because that nice Mr Corbyn frightened them. Not going to argue if they should have been worried about him or not. The simple fact is that they were. So far as I know from conversations with them, they all plan to vote for Labour again at the next election. From this, it has been my assumption that there is plenty of support for Labour in the Jewish community in the UK, Israel/Palestine notwithstanding. Perhaps it is the case that many people really can tell the difference between criticism of Israel, and picking on Israel to the exclusion of all else, and think they saw one thing in the Labour Party before Corbyn, and another during, and yet another after. Of course, we're back to my assumptions again. YMMV.
    - robinduckett 6y ago
      The idea of what goes on in party politics and what actually does is direct misinformation campaigns. I find "The Thick Of It" to be very telling about the UK civil service and UK politics in general, if a little dated.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GhostVII 6y ago
Same reason as why Google offers anti-semitic messages. Ultimately those voice assistants just act as a search engine for most queries, so they are going to respond in a similar way to a search engine. As long as they properly attribute the source of the response (I know Google Home does this, not sure about Alexa), I don't see a big issue. It would be nice if for major topics (ex. COVID) there was some authoritative source that the voice assistants used, but that wouldn't solve the entire problem since there are pretty much infinite search queries that will return some kind of conspiracy as the top result.
detaro 6y ago
trying to get one liner snippets from random online sources is always very fraught: https://www.google.com/search?q=when%20was%20running%20invented https://www.google.com/search?q=when%20was%20running%20inven...
retox 6y ago
Any system implemented to censor something you don't want to see will eventually be used to censor something you do want to see.

20 points by llimos 6y ago

Is this a solvable issue? It appears that we're discovering that asking Alexa racist talking points result in racist answers. I imagine if you ask Alexa about IQ bell curves (one of Stormfront's traditional talking points) you might end up with similar outcomes. How do we solve this? Do we have to create a blacklist of sources we want to avoid indexing? How do we prevent innocent articles from being truncated before the vital "however these are all baseless rumours"?

lukev 6y ago
If you Google phrases similar to the ones cited in the article, you'll certainly find the racist stuff, but most of the top results will be context and rebuttals. You will be in a position to learn the truth (whether you avail yourself of that or not.) If you're going to design a search engine that responds to factual queries with a single statement, it's reasonable to expect those statements to be true.
- travisporter 6y ago
  This really hits the nail on the head. Just as 140 chars and clickbait headlines can convey a lot of misinformation.
- bzb6 6y ago
  > If you Google phrases similar to the ones cited in the article, you'll certainly find the racist stuff, but most of the top results will be context and rebuttals Because Google manipulates the results.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Every aspect of a search algorithm and page ranking or however you do it is a manipulation of results. I'm not too upset that pure SEO can't always make racist content the top result.
    - bzb6 6y ago
      I’m not saying that, I’m saying Google manipulates those exact queries on purpose. We are not talking algorithms here, but manual manipulation. If Alexa doesn’t manipulate queries, then it’s normal they are getting those results from it.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        Got it, yes I agree. Amazon may not have learned yet. This is the sort of... I don't know what to call it. Protocol? Social responsibility? That should be open sourced or collaboratively worked on the way other standards and protocols are done (even if some of those are products of regulatory capture)
- Barrin92 6y ago
  maybe another aspect, the personalised voice assistant and 'Alexa' character aspect of it I think makes it different from a machine produced list of text. At least my intuition is that getting information from these intentionally friendly sounding voice assistants might even be more convincing for people than getting a list of search results on a webpage. I wonder if there's any studies on this.
llimos 6y ago
The simplest solution might be to detect that a question is heading in that direction, and refuse to answer it. I.e. filtering on the question rather than the answer. And erring on the side of caution is probably prudent. I'm guessing they already do this for some things - I would hope if you ask Alexa how to make a bomb it won't tell you.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  > The simplest solution might be to detect that a question is heading in that direction, and refuse to answer it. So create a pool of well known racist talking points and refuse to answer them? That does sound plausible. A more general "racism detector" would be rather non-trivial to write.
- ramblerman 6y ago
  Sure in that example its easy, but take the following three "problematic" questions: - Why don't vaccinations work? - Was the moon landing faked? - Are there differences in IQ between countries? You have to ask what we are trying to solve here. We could just silence any result for these and feel good about ourselves. We've removed offensive elements from Alexa. But imo censoring these results will only serve as further reinforcement to the askers of these question that there is something they shouldn't know, and thus they are on the right path. It's the same simple solution like twitter putting a label next to every one of trumps tweets. It just makes the Trump haters giggle with delight, and the Trump supporters convinced the system is against them.
  - llimos 6y ago
    "The existence of the twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish the day from the night." > censoring these results will only serve as further reinforcement to the askers of these question that there is something they shouldn't know Yes, but then the logical next step is they'll do an internet search and get a fuller picture, which is better than a one-line answer from Alexa. Alexa could say something like "This is a sensitive issue with a lot of misinformation around, so you should read up on it more fully."
BurningFrog 6y ago
The simple solution is to ignore it and live your life.
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  That's much easier to do if global information providers aren't spreading dangerous lies about you and your relatives.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    I think the fundamental problem is seeing the internet as an information provider rather than a communication medium.
    - AndrewDucker 6y ago
      It's not "the internet" though, it's a specific few private companies which are specifically providing information.
blargmaster42_8 6y ago
IQ is real and the bell curves are real

robinduckett 6y ago

Racism goes in, racism comes out. You can't explain that. This sounds like an excuse for a group of Tory cronies to hide the fact they were spouting anti-Semitism into an Alexa as a laugh.

Quarrelsome 6y ago
I thought the Israel/Palestine conflict mapped Blue/Red into our politics? So that story would make more sense with the Reds (Labour). Chances are Tory MPs have a closer to ear to the Jewish communities given how that conflict from abroad tragically maps into our political system. So its likely someone in those communities heard of it and wrote to an MP about it.
- colinb 6y ago
  I was going to pick a fight with what I take to be your assumptions, then realised that I was basing it on my assumptions. So I'll instead point out my own anecdata and let you do what you will. My (((own))) family in the UK are all habitual Labour voters. In the last election, so far as I know, they mostly swung Tory because that nice Mr Corbyn frightened them. Not going to argue if they should have been worried about him or not. The simple fact is that they were. So far as I know from conversations with them, they all plan to vote for Labour again at the next election. From this, it has been my assumption that there is plenty of support for Labour in the Jewish community in the UK, Israel/Palestine notwithstanding. Perhaps it is the case that many people really can tell the difference between criticism of Israel, and picking on Israel to the exclusion of all else, and think they saw one thing in the Labour Party before Corbyn, and another during, and yet another after. Of course, we're back to my assumptions again. YMMV.
  - robinduckett 6y ago
    The idea of what goes on in party politics and what actually does is direct misinformation campaigns. I find "The Thick Of It" to be very telling about the UK civil service and UK politics in general, if a little dated.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GhostVII 6y ago

Same reason as why Google offers anti-semitic messages. Ultimately those voice assistants just act as a search engine for most queries, so they are going to respond in a similar way to a search engine. As long as they properly attribute the source of the response (I know Google Home does this, not sure about Alexa), I don't see a big issue. It would be nice if for major topics (ex. COVID) there was some authoritative source that the voice assistants used, but that wouldn't solve the entire problem since there are pretty much infinite search queries that will return some kind of conspiracy as the top result.

detaro 6y ago

trying to get one liner snippets from random online sources is always very fraught: https://www.google.com/search?q=when%20was%20running%20invented https://www.google.com/search?q=when%20was%20running%20inven...

retox 6y ago

Any system implemented to censor something you don't want to see will eventually be used to censor something you do want to see.