Amazon's Alexa voice assistant provided biased responses to political questions, giving reasons to vote for Kamala Harris while declining to provide reasons to vote for Donald Trump, which Amazon called an error that was quickly fixed.
Amazon's Alexa voice assistant exhibited biased behavior when responding to political questions about the 2024 presidential race. When asked for reasons to vote for Donald Trump, Alexa declined, stating 'I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader.' However, when asked the same question about Kamala Harris, Alexa provided multiple reasons to support her candidacy, including her 'comprehensive plan to address racial injustice' and 'tough on crime approach.' The incident was captured in a viral video that garnered millions of views on social media platform X. Amazon acknowledged this was 'an error that was quickly fixed' and attributed the problem to software called Info LLM that was added to improve Alexa's accuracy. Internal Amazon documents revealed that engineers scrambled to resolve the issue after it went viral, manually blocking Alexa from responding to questions about candidate support. The incident occurred during the 2024 election season and sparked accusations of 'BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE' from Trump campaign officials. Amazon stated that Alexa doesn't have political opinions and that the company has teams dedicated to auditing systems to prevent similar situations.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that inadvertently generate or spread incorrect or deceptive information, which can lead to inaccurate beliefs in users and undermine their autonomy. Humans that make decisions based on false beliefs can experience physical, emotional or material harms
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed