Controversy erupted last month over responses given by Amazon’s Echo device to voters’ questions regarding the reasons to vote for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Most Amazon Echos feature a virtual personal assistant known as “Alexa”, which can provide information such as the weather, current affairs, and why you should vote for the Democratic nominee in a presidential election.
Since a video noting Alexa’s different responses – namely a refusal to give reasons to vote for Trump while listing off several for Harris – spread like wildfire online, GOP lawmakers have investigated a possible election interference case.
According to Fox Business, Amazon told lawmakers that the AI technology had not been updated to reflect Harris’ new status as the Democratic Party presidential nominee. As a result, for a period of six weeks, Alexa freely gave reasons to vote for Harris under the assumption that she was not a presidential candidate.
Although Amazon may have faced questions why this oversight was not spotted sooner, the truth was that they simply were unaware of the issue due to such a low frequency of requests as to why you should vote for Harris. Such queries were only asked 225 times from July 21 to Sept. 2, compared to 14,000 times for Trump – a 6,000% difference!
Many on social media could not help but laugh.
Other commentors were less convinced.
