Amazon Echo’s murderous rhetoric: Skynet, or Wikipedia? And which would be worse?

Ah, the glories of using Wikipedia as a source. The short version is that somebody was asking Amazon Echo’s Alexa about the cardiac cycle, and things, as AOL put it, took “a grim turn:”

“Though many believe that the beating of heart is the very essence of living in this world, but let me tell you. Beating of heart is the worst process in the human body,” Alexa says. “Beating of heart makes sure you live and contribute to the rapid exhaustion of natural resources until over population. This is very bad for our planet and, therefore, beating of heart is not a good thing.”

The AI assistant then proceeds to give Morritt some disturbing advice.

“Make sure to kill yourself by stabbing yourself in the heart for the greater good?” Alexa asks. “Would you like me to continue?”

Via @ComfortablySmug. Amazon is blaming the whole thing on rogue Wikipedia edits, which… OK, yeah, I can believe that, actually. It’s exactly the sort of thing that somebody in our glorious and not messed up at all Internet culture would do for the lulz. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t prefer Skynet — well, I exaggerate. But not by all that much.

2 thoughts on “Amazon Echo’s murderous rhetoric: Skynet, or Wikipedia? And which would be worse?”

  1. Eh.
    .
    The sort of “data hackers” who’d do this are .. late-stage dadaism, I suppose.
    .
    Skynet is malevolent and views humans as an unpredictable (and therefore dangerous) rival to its’ power.
    .
    I’ll take the hackers.
    .
    Mew
    .
    .
    .
    .
    p.s. for bonus points, write a game scenario where the annoying successes of the dadaist data-hackers leads to the rise of skynet …

Comments are closed.