Incident 55: Alexa Plays Pornography Instead of Kids Song

Description: An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Children.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
55
Report Count
16
Incident Date
2016-12-30
Editors
Sean McGregor

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song. The child said "Alexa, play Tigger Tigger" and Alexa responded with “You want to hear a station for porn detected...hot chick amateur girl sexy" and began to make other pornographic references until the parents turned off the Dot.

Short Description

An Amazon Echo Dot using the Amazon Alex software started to play pornographic results when a child asked it to play a song.

Severity

Negligible

AI System Description

The Amazon Alexa personal assistant listens to voice commands, and either provides information or takes action (e.g. playing a song, turning on lights).

System Developer

Amazon

Sector of Deployment

Information and communication

Relevant AI functions

Perception, Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

voice recognition, natural language processing

AI Applications

AI personal assistant

Named Entities

Amazon

Technology Purveyor

Amazon

Beginning Date

12-2016

Ending Date

12-2016

Near Miss

Unclear/unknown

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

Voice commands

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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