Amazon Alexa responds to child with pornographic response
Amazon's Alexa voice software misinterpreted a child's prompt with a crude pornographic response, promting concerns about it's safety. A child asked Amazon's Alexa voice software to 'Play Digger Digger', one of his favourite songs, only to be met with crude and pornographic language, to the horror of his parents. Instead of Alexa playing the child's request, Alexa started saying 'You want to hear a station for ‘Porn detected….Porno ringtone hot chick amateur girl calling sexy,' followed by a string of crude and dirty words. After an initial delay which could be construed as the adults not believing what they’re hearing from Alexa, they could be heard shouting “No! No! No! Alexa, stop!” to command Alexa to stop the command. Amazon later said that they had fixed the issue and were working towards building additional restrictions to prevent this kind of incident from happening in the future. System 🤖 Amazon Alexa Operator: Developer: Amazon Country: USA Sector: Consumer good s Purpose: Provide information, services Technology: NLP/text analysis; Natural language understanding (NLU); Speech recognition Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Safety Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️ Wilson C. (2020). Dangerous Skills Got Certified: Measuring the Trustworthiness of Amazon Alexa Platform (pdf)
- Date it happened
- 2016-12-01
- Organisation involved
- Kristin Livdahl; Amazon
- Product, system or model
- Amazon Alexa
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.