11/30/2017 / By Ethan Huff
Having an always-listening, always-connected spy device like Amazon’s Alexa in your home that creates grocery lists, conducts internet searches, and even turns on and off lights just by speaking at it might seem cool to “techies” who are willing to sacrifice their privacy in exchange for the illusion of convenience. But these creepy wire-tap devices are actually even more nefarious than anyone could have imagined, as users are now observing that the pre-programmed answers offered by their artificial intelligence (AI) software are, in many cases, patently false.
Political commentator Steven Crowder exposed this in a video he recently posted to YouTube, demonstrating that Alexa is little more than a radical social justice warrior (SJW) with Antifa-like political leanings. Crowder decided to ask his Alexa device a series of questions relevant to things that are going on in the world today, and the answers he received are nothing short of shocking, to say the least – albeit expected, considering the fact that multi-national retail predator Amazon is the entity in charge of Alexa’s programming.
In his video, Crowder opens up by asking Alexa the simple question, “How many genders are there?” If Alexa was programmed to tell the truth, “she” (or what we’ll refer to as “it” throughout the duration of this article) would have responded by explaining that biology dictates that there are only two genders: male and female. Instead, Alexa offered a litany of talking points that seem to have been pulled straight from Wellesley College‘s Women’s and Gender Studies curriculum.
“The two main categories of the gender spectrum, male and female, are called the gender binary, but there are many other categories that exist,” Alexa is heard stating. “Because gender identity is complex and personal, there is no definite way to say how many genders there are.”
Who knew that so much politically correct gobbledygook could be packed into a single, pre-programmed response from a plug-and-play robot? But it gets much, much worse. When it comes to religion, Alexa is apparently a devout Muslim with a bias against the Christian faith, as evidenced by its answers concerning the respective leaders of the two religions and their significance in the world today.
Crowder decided to ask Alexa, “Who is the prophet Muhammed?” to which it offered its own personal opinions about this controversial historical figure. Rather than simply explain that Muhammed is the revered prophet of Islam, as per the search results that one might discover if typing the same question into Google or Bing, Alexa was heard gushing about how Muhammed is “a very wise prophet who taught many people how to live.”
Mind you, this is the stock answer that Alexa apparently gives to this question – devoid of facts and 100 percent conjecture and opinion. It’s almost as if a devout Muslim pre-programmed Alexa to say such an absurd thing, though you might be asking yourself: Perhaps Alexa gives these types of answers to all questions pertaining to religious figures? Hardly.
Though he doesn’t show this in his video, Crowder claims that when he first asked Alexa the same question about the Lord Jesus Christ instead of Muhammed that the device responded by claiming that “Jesus is a fictional character.” Amazon apparently changed this answer rather quickly after Crowder’s video received several million views, Alexa now offering the answer that Jesus was “a Jewish preacher.”
“Considering Alexa had such high praise for a mass murderer, you would think she’d have some fuzzy feelings about Jesus, who never killed anyone. You would be wrong,” says Megan Fox from PJ Media. Fox, when she asked her own Alexa about Jesus Christ, was given a barebones answer with “no mention of Jesus being wise or teaching many people how to live good lives.”
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Tagged Under: Alexa, Alt-Left, Amazon, bias, computing, gender, Islam, Jesus Christ, muhammed, political correctness, pseudoscience, robot tech, transgenderism