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‘What the actual fu— ?’ Amazon’s Alexa cites Rumble, claims 2020 election was stolen

October 8, 2023 | | Print Article

Amazon’s Alexa is getting spanked.

Apparently, the AI-driven voice assistant has either gone rogue or ingested the mother of all Red Pills.

When asked about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Alexa cited Rumble and declared it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” according to The Washington Post, which, coincidentally, is also owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Alexa went on to reference Substack and explained that the 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers.”

Sourcing “an Alexa answers contributor,” Alexa then proclaimed that former President Donald Trump won Pennsylvania.

It was almost too much for WaPo to bear.

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“Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election,” fumed The Post’s Cat Zakrzewski. “Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.”

“The company also worked with the Census Bureau to ensure that the voice assistant didn’t spread falsehoods that would deter people from taking part in the once-a-decade count, which has far-reaching implications for elections and decisions about the American economy,” she later noted.

According to Zakrzewski, “Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources.”

Amazon spokeswoman Lauren Raemhild stressed that the “errors” were “quickly fixed.”

“These responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times, and quickly fixed when brought to our attention,” she told The Post in a statement. “We continually audit and improve the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content.”

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During elections, Alexa works with “credible sources” to provide information in real-time, Raemhild assured the outlet, pointing to Reuters, Ballotpedia and RealClearPolitics.

“After The Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed,” Zakrzewski reported.

Now, when asked questions The Post had flagged, Alexa replies, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that.”

Still, the voice assistant seems conflicted.

“Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020,” Zakrzewski stated.

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Jacob Glick served as investigative counsel on the notorious Jan. 6 committee.

Currently a policy counsel at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Glick called Alexa’s responses — three years after what Zakrzewski described as “the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol” — “alarming.”

“If major corporations are helping to give life to the ‘big lie’ years after the fact, they’re enabling the animating narrative of American domestic extremism to endure,” Glick said. “They should be doing everything they can to stop the ‘big lie’ in its tracks, lest we see history repeat itself.”

Zakrzewski sees Alexa’s take on the 2020 elections as a reason to ensure Big Tech policies free speech:

The answers foreshadow a new information battleground in the 2024 elections, as Trump — the GOP front-runner — campaigns for the White House on the false claim that election fraud drove his 2020 loss.

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Tech companies have long resisted being cast as arbiters of truth online. But technologies like voice assistants and chatbots, which serve up a single definitive answer rather than millions of ranked links or posts, stand to magnify debates about online speech that have dogged Silicon Valley since the 2016 election.

Voice assistants and advanced chatbots are only as accurate as the websites, news reports and other data they draw from across the web. These tools risk baking in and amplifying the falsehoods and biases present in their sources.

Alexa draws data from “Amazon, licensed content providers and websites like Wikipedia,” Raemhild said.

“The voice assistant is poised to reach a wide swath of Americans before next year’s election: More than 75 million people in the United States are expected to use Alexa at least once a month in 2024, according to an analysis from Insider Intelligence, a market research company,” fretted Zakrzewski.

Glick echoed her fears, claiming Alexa and AI-powered systems could “potentially double down on the damage that’s been done.”

“If you have AI models drawing from an internet that is filled with platforms that don’t care about the preservation of democracy,” he said, “… you’re going to get information that includes really dangerous undercurrents.”

On X, many folks are flabbergasted.

“What the actual fu— ?” asked one incredulous user.

Other left-leaning users found a silver lining in Alexa’s responses.

“BREAKING: The Republican Party has found their new speaker,” one user said.

But at least one user believes Alexa deserves the last laugh.

“It just might happen,” the user wrote, “that Alexa is smarter than the WAPO and others!”

Melissa Fine
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