NEW DELHI: Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa made an unproven claim that the 2020 US Presidential election “was stolen”, a claim previously made by former President Donald Trump after losing to Joe Biden. The Washington Post reported that when asked about election fraud, Alexa stated that the election was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud”. The source cited for this claim was Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives. Alexa also incorrectly stated that Trump won Pennsylvania, when in fact it was Biden.
Despite investigations into the 2020 election, there has been no evidence of fraud. It is worth noting that Amazon promotes Alexa as a reliable source for election news to its estimated user base of over 70 million.
These responses from Alexa raise concerns about the potential misuse of artificial intelligence to spread false information. Amazon declined to explain why Alexa’s election answers are sourced from unvetted sources, but stated that these errors were quickly fixed and that they continually work to improve their systems for detecting and blocking inaccurate content.