[annoyingnoob]

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

[omnicognate]

You don't teach children to use Alexa. If Alexa is there they just talk to it.

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.

[jdmichal]

> You don't teach children to use Alexa. If Alexa is there they just talk to it.

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.

[annoyingnoob]

Yes, kids learn a lot by observing others. Your 5 year did not talk to a Google device before he saw someone else do it. Kids learn just from watching you, its still teaching and learning. Saying OK Google to electronic devices is not innate in humans.

[jdmichal]

I guess "teaching" can be done passively, though I feel like the context of my comment made it clear that I meant "teach" as a purposeful action. Maybe you can read it as, "we never instructed him to", if being pedantic about the word "teach" is preventing this conversation from moving forward.

[cpuguy83]

Just because they can figure out how to use it doesn't mean you don't teach them how to use it. In particular what to do with the information they get from it.

[gruez]

>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.

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.

[shkkmo]

The source for the result was a page warning about a dangerous challenge that parents should watch out for.

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.

[mmastrac]

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could.

They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

[systemvoltage]

I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general.

Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.

[salt-thrower]

How is that "literal nanny state?" We're talking about removing a home assistant's ability to tell you to do something lethally stupid. Basic consumer safety measures are a staple of a healthy society; just because a device is in your home doesn't exempt it from the government setting safety standards for it. If anything, the opposite is true.

Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.

[mmastrac]

There are plenty of government regulations that work. Regulation doesn't preclude breaking them up, which I'm also in favour of.

[systemvoltage]

Sure, I want natural gas lines leading to my apartment to be regulated. But, I see Alexa as an information source. I don't want books to be regulated just as much as I want Alexa to be regulated.

[salt-thrower]

I for one wouldn't assume that "Alexa, give me a challenge to do" would be pulling from the open, uncensored internet. I would assume that Amazon had some kind of curation method that would remove the possibility of Alexa telling you to do something lethally stupid.

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.

[annoyingnoob]

When I ask for something really general, I assume that Alexa is just a voice controlled web browser. Since Alexa is really about advertising and selling you things, I would assume that any curation is just to drive you to Amazon products. Once you get outside of products that Amazon can sell you then Alexa breaks down to a basic web search - as evidenced here.

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.

[hakfoo]

The assistant platforms fall back on web search because they want to pretend to be omniscent. If it said in the documentation "here are the 1,602 commands explicitly supported, the data sources it pulls from, and anything else goes to an error message", it wouldn't be magical anymore.

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.

[encryptluks2]

This is the best answer and the media looks for opportunities to push an agenda. I'd rather Alexa sometimes get things wrong because it is just searching the web than to have it constantly updated with "approved" content.

[shkkmo]

Not only did Alexa retrieve the wrong content (instead of a list of challenges to do, Alexa sourced from a list of dangerous challenges you shouldn't do), Alexa then stripped off the entire context of the warning about not doing the challenge because it was dangerous, and instead added a timer.

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.

[encryptluks2]

You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing. If a site owner doesn't markup their site properly, then that could also be the cause of issues like this. Do you really expect Alexa to be "smart" enough to understand human logic like an actual human, or do you not see that AI can basically mean Alexa goes to the web, does a search and parses markup from a website to the best of its ability and they call it AI? Some people care about the technicalities and others just want it to work perfectly, but I think the people that care about the technicalities are more realistic than just wanting something to be the way they think it should be.

[shkkmo]

> You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing.

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.

[hakfoo]

The right answer is that Alexa (especially in a "Kids" mode) should only pull from a white-listed, manually vetted data pool. It wouldn't find the list of dangerous challenges in the first place.

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.