Well THAT’s embarrassing!
At the end of the most recent post, discussing Amazon’s explanation for why its AI bot Alexa was telling inquirers to vote for Kamala Harris, I wrote,
“Can anyone point to an “error” by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon or Google that ever favored Trump or Republicans rather than their Axis pals and allies? Please enlighten me if there are any: I doubt there are. Amazon is “the dishonest waiter,” one of many providing lousy service to distort our democracy.”
Guess who pointed me to not only such an error in the other direction, but an error by Amazon itself, also involving Alexa? Me. I wrote about it in a post from a year ago called “AI Ethics: Should Alexa Have A Right To Its Opinion?”
There Ethics Alarms described how Alexa was telling people that the 2020 election was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud.” Alexa informed inquirers that the 2020 contest was “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” and referenced various Substack newsletters. It was sure that Trump really won Pennsylvania.
This was fixed, of course. But I owe Amazon an apology, at least in this case. Maybe Alexa’s pro-Axis bias really was an honest mistake. I still don’t trust Amazon or Big Tech not to use their power to try to help their favorite party, but my presumption of misconduct here was unfair, and based on inadequate research and a faulty memory.
I will strive to do better.
Ethics Alarms 
This certainly highlights why the current regenerative AI is inherently unreliable when trying to look at factual events.
As I understand it, these AI chat bots are basically programmed by feeding it megatons of data from the internet and elsewhere and having it put together text of how a human might respond given that information.
The problem is that — believe it or not — not everything ever published on the internet is true. Yes you heard it here first! There are paragraphs, articles, databases, and more that you are able to pull up on the internet that are just not factual.
If your main source of information was “Mission of Gravity” by Hal Clement, you might come away with some interesting information on weather, physics, biology, and more. But since it is set on a planet where the normal gravity is 100 times Earth’s, and a six inch fall would be fatal, you might just come away with some faulty information on traveling and walking safely.
I am sure there are plenty of web sites that will explain to us that Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2020 and won the national popular vote. Some of us have better data.