"While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a strong candidate with a proven track record of accomplishments. As the first female vice president, Harris has already broken down major gender barriers and her career in politics has been characterized by a commitment to progressive ideals and a focus on helping disenchanted communities."
Artificial intelligence software added late last year to improve Alexa’s accuracy instead helped land Amazon at the center of an embarrassing political dust-up, with Trump spokesman Steven Cheung accusing the company in a post on X of “BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
It's just an "embarrassing" "dust-up." Nothing big, deep, and nefarious.
Amazon said Alexa’s behavior was “an error that was quickly fixed.”
Oh, well then. Just "an error." And "quickly fixed." Yes, I believe it was a mistake to make it so obvious and easily demonstrated and shared and that, on notice, Amazon quickly fixed it. But I remain suspicious that Alexa contains bias in favor of the Democratic Party.
[I]nside Amazon, software engineers scrambled to figure out what went wrong, according to internal discussions of workers trying to resolve the issue seen by The Post....
Who decided and selected what would be seen by The Post?
On Tuesday, one Amazon worker highlighted a post on X with nearly 3 million views that showed Alexa responding to the question “Why should I not vote for Donald Trump?” The assistant cited “several reasons,” including “Some people are concerned about his policies such as his stance on immigration,” the employee wrote, adding that workers had implemented a “block for the given response.”
Ah! There are human beings watching and pulling the strings. As I said 2 days ago, in a post about self-driving cars, "That's always how it's been with robots. We suspect there's really a little guy in there." Some of what we receive as if it is automated is the work of humans, monitoring and motivated to affect the results.
Back to the new WaPo article:
Shortly after Alexa’s error was flagged internally...
WaPo assumes it was an error!
... workers manually blocked Alexa from responding to questions about reasons to support one candidate over another.
The little man in the robot suit strikes again.
But it took a while longer to figure out what caused Alexa to speak out of turn.
Out of turn?! WaPo assumes it was an error! Prove to me that they didn't get caught in the act of doing something they intended.
The controversy turned out to be related to a piece of software added to Alexa last year to increase its accuracy called Info LLM, apparently a reference to AI technology known as large language models that also power ChatGPT. After the new component was added, Amazon initially saw Alexa make fewer errors on politics queries, company documents say. But users throw many more political questions at the assistant during election seasons, increasing the stakes of any errors....
Turned out to be?! Exactly how did the answer "turn out to be" what you're saying it is?
Let me talk like mainstream media: The Washington Post asserted without evidence that Alexa's overt political bias was caused by some new software.
Sentence buried near the end of the article:
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Posts
90 comments:
Corporate America is now mostly D. When did that happen? What caued the change? In 1980 wasn't most of corporate Aerica R? Is it the social issues?
Gosh - The older I get the more typos. America, of course.
Bezos did quickly put out a nice comment after attempted DJT assassination.
fewer errors on politics queries
Define your terms. Cite specific examples for analysis.
I did a search yesterday for Trump-Vance campaign stops. The top selected item was a Harris-Walz donation page.
It is weird how all these errors always go in one direction.
It worked. Didn’t it?
More completely random errors which, as others have said, somehow always favor the Dems. Years ago, I used to offer a significant reward to someone who could document similar "Errors" in terms of number and severity in an equivalent time for a Democrat in the same position. Nobody ever took me up on that, always with an arrogant dismissal of my "paranoia."
There’s a certain admirable honesty in Alexis’ description of Harris’ “accomplishments.” She “broke down gender barriers.” Her only listed accomplishment is that she’s female. You could ask what gender barrier she broke down since another woman ran for president in 2016.
Can you imagine letting Alexa's "opinion" have any weight at all in formulating your choice in the presidential election? Does Rich work at Amazon? I do not use any voice-activated software crap. I will admit that, based on my observations of friends using such software, it might be a step toward SOME woman listening to me.
Perhaps it is time to rename Alexa -- does Pinocchio sound good?
Skepticism is always warranted in this media environment, and doubly so when it comes to the billionaires who Democrats consider their allies. Look how long the government let Amazon get away with not “turning a profit” (i.e. no taxable income) while the market valuation soared making Bezos a multibillionaire. Did that have something to do with him contributing millions to DNC coffers openly while surreptitiously using devices like Kindle and Alexa to push far left policies?
We’ll never know. Unlike the billionaire property developer who ran against Hillary, the Government blob has no interest in the ones who help The Cause and further the Narrative. (See Hoffman, Reid for further proof.)
It's much more likely that it initially responded with reasons to vote for Trump and they blocked that.
Well, mistakes do happen, and the good news is, sometimes they don't get discovered.
"The discrepancy set off a social media maelstrom. Right-wing accounts on X amplified the video, and other Alexa users who asked their own devices about the candidates appeared to receive the same uneven responses. Media outlets and Trump campaign officials stoked the controversy...."
When Progressives get caught cheating, the reaction is the story, and the cheaters fade into the background, safely obscured.
Artificial Intelligence favors artificial candidate. Sounds about right.
Didn’t Shirley Chisholm, a black woman, run for president long before that?
I think you meant to say, 'Her only listed qualification is that she's female'. She did nothing to accomplish that one, either
They tried hard to make this a Republicans pounce story but it went viral with normal people uninvolved in politics.
Since Blackrock, State Street et al are leftie hacks in charge of ‘passive’ investment. ESG scores have teeth and matter to these ‘owners’. Just because Larry Fink doesn’t wear his shiny zip up onesie to work doesn’t mean he isn’t a beta evil bond villain…
Same reason most lawyers are Democrats—big government and big regulation are good for big business.
When was the last time a legacy or one-time "mainstream" media outlet made an error in favor of a Republican?
* Never ever for Trump
* Never for G.W. Bush and his "oil imperialism"
* Never for G.H.W. Bush and his "creepy" CIA background
* Never for Reagan with Alzheimer's and Iran-Contra and $600 hammers
* Never for Nixon...for him the media invented the -gate suffix
* Never for Goldwater, per the little girl/flower/nuke ad
I guess Eisenhower was the last Republican who may have had a media error in his favor. His critique of "military-industrial complex" speech got a lot of press, so maybe the media decided to stop reporting on such threats to the establishment.
Maybe the fact that the bias was objectively obvious and many thousands of people tried it and verified the results is what made Amazon release their “apologetic” statement. After all in the post-truth era when Google and Wikipedia simply memory-hole inconvenient facts, it is quite difficult to ascertain if a fact is actually factual. This was different. Too many ordinary people had already peeked behind the curtain. Therefore it validates suspicions we already had about being manipulated by technology companies and devices. Now that seed is taking root amongst previously somnolent people who will continue to ask themselves “What else are they doing to manipulate us?”
Trump. The DNC media believe they made a yuuuge mistake in his favor by treating him as a normal candidate in 2015, hence the nearly decade long push to scold anyone who “normalizes” him.
Ah! There are human beings watching and pulling the strings. As I said 2 days ago, in a post about self-driving cars, "That's always how it's been with robots. We suspect there's really a little guy in there." Some of what we receive as if it is automated is the work of humans, monitoring and motivated to affect the results.
I joined a consumer market research/feedback group for a car manufacturer a year or so ago. One of their first initiatives was the public roll out of their full self driving technology, at a time when many manufacturers were doing the same. I wrote a few paragraphs on the risks of US liability and Peltzman Effect. There were a many follow up questions from the team, then…the FSD marketing dried up…from all the companies. Hedged instead with ‘limited’ hands free, etc…
You’re welcome 😎
The apparatus is large and contains multitudes. It has no name. It is all "good thinking" people united against the horror of four more years of Trump in control.
It will choose death (for us all) before it chooses this dishonor. The only way to defeat the apparatus is to understand that it does not choose, it is chosen. Turn away from the apparatus and you will see the world as it is.
Get Bezos in front of a Congressional hearing this morning. AG’s of TX and FL should immediately file criminal charges.
That’s how it works, isn’t it?
That wasn't a "mistake" in Trump's favor, it was a tactic they later regretted.
Funny how all the errors that are biased from our propaganda media are all targeted at one person in the world.
Since our host is based in the swing state of Wisconsin, I wonder if this blog's comment section will be more heavily targeted by sponsored commenters to get out the party line in the next couple of months.
Wait till they are armed ala skynet
what assassination?
ask Bezo's Alexa.. She'll straighten you out
according to Alexa Donald Trump was NOT shot.. it was ALL a lie
His rambling speeches and incoherent policies will continue to drive people and AI away.
He's looking like old old news with every day that passes.
Maybe there was a little woman in the robot suit this time...with some little cats.
There seem to be a disproportionate number of commenters from Arizona as well.
You have to be officially approaching dolt to ask Alexa either of the questions posed. Dumb-assery writ small.
Chat GPT denies that Trump was shot. Something about "there are no credible reports of such an incident" etc.
"Alexa, I read the article in the Post, but what really happened?"
One word: Epstein. Apparently a lot of oligarchs with foreign ties really don't like the idea of a President who will take that foreign intelligence ring seriously.
The little man in the robot suit strikes again. In the Wizard of Oz, the Wizard is the real villain. A snake-oil salesman behind the curtain pulling everyone's chain.
Jet age technology speeding Communist propaganda into the future!
Democracy Dies In Dust-up
Kamala Harris doesn't pass the Turing Test
Big business will always adapt to the political environment and like Tim suggests above, the bigger the business is the more it supports onerous regulations that make it difficult for small competitors to comply with regulations and threaten their cheese. Government creates barriers to entry, one of the most favorable conditions that allows monopolies to thrive. In turn Big Biz captures regulators further entrenching their "market leading" status. ESG and DEI were natural outgrowths of this crappy biz-gov alliance.
At the risk of being pedantic, Tim, I'll add that executing a "tactic that they later regretted" is pretty much the textbook definition of a "mistake" LINK
Reminiscent of how in recent times there have been many more close elections than random statistical chance would suggest, and many more of them end up as a narrow victory for the Democrat than random chance would ever allow. Curious, that. I saw an analysis once that noted that the discrepancy was statistically strong enough that it would be easily admissible as evidence in court if it pertained to something like employment discrimination or embezzlement.
Bless your heart, you try sooooo hard LOL
(Watch out for falling polls. They're heavy!)
Maybe we could call it the “Dominion Effect”…
Part of the subtextuals of this viral story is that (1) people are curious about Trump and/or Kamala and are not getting enough reliable news to make up their minds; (2) people have so tuned out the "news" that they figure an AI "personal assistant can do the research for them; and (3) there are low propensity voters finally propelled to action, even if they are lazy and tech-dependent, who want to know the difference between the candidates.
You'd be surprised how many younger people avoid all news sources and are quite dependent on voice-activated devices. Trusting that voice is dumb, as you state, but some lessons you gotta learn the hard way.
That's funny!
Those algos are as easily manipulated as a voter getting their info from NBC.
I would dare any of you to listen to Trump’s answer on child care and tell me what the hell he was talking about. It was one of the more incoherent things I've ever heard.. In Trump's defense, he's never raised a child.
Donald Trump’s answer on how he will make childcare more affordable:
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1831748114367283575
This is an unedited transcript of his response:
Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is. Couldn't, you know, there's something, you have to have it – in this country you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to — but they'll get used to it very quickly – and it's not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Uh, those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care.
We're gonna have - I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about.
We're gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care, uh, is talked about as being expensive, it's, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in. We're going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people, but we're going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we're a failing nation, so we'll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.
As has been said before, Democracy Dies in Darkness is an objective, not a cautionary motto.
Corporate America is now mostly D. When did that happen? What caued the change?
Obama bailed out corporations with our money in 2009. Biden-Harris bailed out corporations with our money in 2021. Follow the money.
Well. "accomplishments" we can talk about in front of the children.
I'm just gobsmacked that people put these things in their house. What exactly do they do that people can't do already? I already have a computer and a smart phone that I know are bored to tears listening to me.
“After Motorcade Involved In Fender Bender, Tim Walz Adds Purple Heart To Resume” https://buff.ly/3XtSa5M
You first, Rich. You've been avoiding this question. How are price controls a benefit to the American consumer? How is taxing unrealized gains going to improve investment?
it's ALL just a coin flip!
If you flip a coin a hundred times.. and it comes up tails a hundred times..
You can be PRETTY SURE, that it will come up tails the next time too..
Because it is a two tailed coin
That’s because ChatGPT is only updated to 2023.
Could be worse, she could tell you what you want to hear based on everything you and everyone else in the house says in front of her. And censor everything else. Sort of like the way YouTube won't send me any Democrat political shorts or videos unless I actively search for them, but insists on sending me infinite numbers of pro-Trump videos no matter how often I ask it not to do so.
is now time to coin a new word to go wiyth take, mistake - 'distake'
@Rusty: What is Trump's plan to make childcare more affordable?
“We're going to raise billions from tariffs and we can use some of that to help” ~ DonaldTrump at Economic Club of New York.
[In other words, there is no plan]
What's affordable depends on how much money you make. A poor economy and high inflation make things unaffordable.
Trump's answer to questions like, "What is your plan to make childcare more affordable?" is not going to be a government assistance program. It's going to be a strong economy, higher incomes, high paying jobs and lower inflation will make childcare more affordable.
A government program to give people money is not going to make childcare more affordable. It's going to increase inflation and slow economic growth and hurt jobs because it's just going to shift the burden of childcare onto somebody else.
That explains why the answer for Kamala that Scott Adams demonstrated when he tested the question was just an "I got nothing". It certainly appeared that the Kamala answer had been manually suppressed by a hard coded overwrite. I thought they might be looking for the bad actor employee/contractor who put the Kamala answer in but apparently, the bad actor actions happened way back when they coded the AI/LLM to swing Leftist.
@ Rusty: How they differ is this: Harris actually has a policy; Trump babbles about tariffs and how he’ll issue executive orders to fix everything.
A lot of voters like a politician with conviction, of which Trump has many (34 at the latest count).
What was the crime, Richie?
FWIW, the "gift links" aren't really... THey require an email address, and if you've ever subscribed before, they are not free but pop up with a "resubscribe to read this" request for a credit card to match the email you've entered...
Hth. You are trying to share something for "free", not shill for WaPo, I presume?
The DNC media believe they made a yuuuge mistake in his favor by treating him as a normal candidate in 2015, hence the nearly decade long push to scold anyone who “normalizes” him.
They didn't treat him as a "normal" candidate in 2015. They vigorously promoted his candidacy, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of free publicity, and ever since then have been plagued with remorse and recriminations for having done so. In part this was for ratings and profit, given that he was already a celebrity. But mostly it was done at the behest of Democrat strategists, who perceived him as a weak candidate against Hillary.
Fools, all of them. It will be a pleasure to savor their suffering for a second time when he is re-elected. My only regret is that it will stave off the inevitable bankruptcy and collapse of the dinosaur news media for four more years, as the likes of Rich and Inga obsessively scour the MS-NBC and NY Times websites for any scrap of bad news about him.
"Normal" is kind of a subjective term there. My original statement would be more precisely worded as "pretended to treat him as a normal candidate." I'm so old I remember when they used to cover BOTH candidates in a presidential election.
Calling Trump's remarks at the NY Economics Club incoherent gibberish is not a biased attack. It is a completely rational observation. He did not speak in coherent or complete sentences. And when he did, proposals like (tariff's -- childcare) do not make sense.
Harris has a "policy"? Great! Someone furnish a link to it and I'll check it out.
I asked Alexa when an assassination attempt had been made against Trump. She said she "couldn't help" me with that. When I asked about the attempt against Reagan, I got an immediate answer.
We are talking about different things here. The media's treatment of Trump 2016 was a conscious and systematic effort to generate ratings and ad money with constant "Trump outrages", set him up as the Republican front-runner, and position Hillary for an easy victory. Her giddy grin during the 2nd debate revealed collusion -- their "rope a dope" was going exactly as planned. The Democrats BELIEVED this strategy would work until half way through election night when the votes came in...see Hillary's planned acceptance speech on a national map stage under a glass ceiling. It proved to be a bad strategy, but then, Trump narrowly won...
In writing "error" above I meant a one-off actual interpretive error by a nominal professional doing their best. I meant sincere misreadings of evidence with little thought or planning behind it. The benefit of the doubt for an isolated event/statement/controversy always leans toward Democrats and away from Republicans. In contrast, the cynical propaganda of the Trump era is just that - propaganda.
A couple of years ago when the Danish mask study came out, I did my own little experiment. I searched for the same term in Google and DuckDuckGo. Google's first page of links were 80% to think pieces criticizing it; DDG's first page was 80% news articles just relating what it found. They are not making mistakes. It's intentional.
"Rambling speeches" means he talks to real people who ask questions and get answers.
Lowering your inflation would help. A healthy economy would, too.
Economics "does not make sense" to lefties like you.
It was a multiple choice question.
I cannot imagine anyone who would seriously vote based on what Alexa told them. I know we have some people in the world who are gamers, people who have been alive only since mobile phones and the additional objects connected to the internet, but I don't believe even that would vote based on Alexa's advise.
My son has one and uses it to turn stuff on and off. I wouldn't have one in the house.
If you knew a bit about Economics, it might make sense to you.
Funny how all the accidents and mistakes always go one way, isn't it. It's like in politics, where compromise always means moving to the more liberal position.
If you're relying on Alexa to give you voting advice, maybe you ought not be voting.
What is Trump's plan to make childcare more affordable?
Again, why is it the President's responsibility to make childcare more affordable?
They could have condensed the article to:
"Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Post, told us to report that it was just a snafu, it's been fixed, and there's no reason to be concerned".
"Rich," of course has a government program in mind.
"A government program to give people money is not going to make childcare more affordable."
Are you sure? That technique has worked wonders with college tuition.
/s
I can't believe the let the chance slip for a "Republicans Pounce" headline.
You're not answering the question asked , Rich. How are price controls going to help the American consumer? You claim to be financially savy.
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