It struck me as strange, recently, when I caught Alexa in a lie.
She hasn’t lied to me since she said 2022 was a leap year, and actually that was just a misunderstanding. (She quoted the India Times, and they have different leap years in India.)
This time I had a scrap of a song in my head with the lyric, “Everything’s rosy, everything’s Jake.” I asked Alexa what song that was, so I could sing it all the way through, because that’s how you kill an earworm.
She said it was Sweet Transvestite from Rocky Horror. No. Noooo. A short manual search turned up I Told You I Love You, Now Get Out — a very different song, but it was the one stuck in my head.
And it all made me wonder, when AI screws up we call it a “hallucination,” but Alexa lies, and at best she’s just “wrong?”
2 responses to “Alexa Is Wrong”
In general, the more online content is polluted with inaccuracies, the more anything/anyone who relies on search result answers is going to be wrong. Alexa does that, in theory, but I’m a little baffled on this one because… I can’t find that on howstuffworks.com. Maybe they’re already using generative AI in Alexa sometimes as a test to see if it works for this sort of thing… and it once again doesn’t work?
KC – I thought the same.