Echoing some home truths

Alexa’s got more pushy of late. Seems like almost every query invites some hostile FYI upsell: ‘by the way…’, ‘did you know…’. Presumably some Seattle product manager is on the hook for steep usage targets and is having to deal with the insurmountable issue that voice UIs are notoriously undiscoverable.

So… has anyone else taken to swearing at it as way to influence the algorithm? I’m positive a company like Amazon is listening for abusive replies and coding them as strong negative feedback signals. (If they’re not, they’re really missing a trick.)

I’m generally sentimental about the prospect of treating machine partners well, at least in years to come (see Future Ethics, ch8 – I’m also writing an essay that’s warm on robot moral patiency for my AI Ethics module). But I don’t see we have any other forms of recourse or protest, other than throwing the things into a river.

My point, I guess: it might be okay to tell Alexa to fuck off, you know.