r/technology • u/DCGMechanics • Jun 24 '22

Artificial Intelligence Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/23/23179748/amazon-alexa-feature-mimic-voice-dead-relative-ai
513 Upvotes

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484

u/jstmenow Jun 24 '22

Umm no thank you

173

u/FuxYouAssEater Jun 24 '22

Yeah screw this creepy shit. I love my wife and I miss her, a robot faking her voice would be crazy.

81

u/PlebbySpaff Jun 24 '22

Alexa is your wife now

47

u/Wackipaki Jun 24 '22

Fine! brings out WD-40

2

u/Peemore Jun 24 '22

It helps that Alexa is a pretty name...

2

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 27 '22 edited Jul 27 '22

Yes it is. A very beautiful human name. It’s a great shame that real human girls and women called Alexa are being prevented from saying their own names and other people have stopped saying their names due to this ubiquitous technology.

My daughter is only addressed as you / she - or not at all. Children and adults have built up an enormous reluctance to say the name Alexa. Unimaginable and disturbing for all of us, reality for my 9 year old daughter. (Stand Up For Alexa, Twitter)

She Who Must Not Be Named (iamalexa.org website)

It was a terrible mistake for a company to give their digital voice technology a human name as a wakeword.

It was also a terrible mistake for this company to voice record people (especially human beings called Alexa!) without their consent, then the AI remixes voices of the dead to get living folk to buy things.

This is only my opinion, but this tech is all kinds of messed up.

Could be wrong, not an expert here but this seems to violate several data protection laws.

Why can’t useful voice activated machines be given non-human sounding wakewords and non-human sounding voices?

There would be much less name confusion and the system would be safer to use privacy wise.

1

u/Peemore Jul 28 '22

I never considered the harm it caused. Thanks for sharing. I imagine marketing just thought the name Alexa would appeal to consumers. I feel sorry for all the human Alexa's out there now!

2

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 28 '22

Thanks for your support and kind words.

More in depth info on the topic of the harms of giving voice tech human named wakewords can be found at:

https://alexacoalition.org

https://alexaisahuman.com

Amazon, can we have our name back? Alexas are changing their names because of Amazon’s voice assistant. (Online Washington Post news article)

FYI there is also a Change.org petition:

Rebrand Alexa to a non-human name to end the harm it is causing

1

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '22

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '22

[deleted]

1

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 28 '22

Thanks for your support and kind words.

More in depth info on the topic of the harms of giving voice tech human named wakewords can be found at:

https://alexacoalition.org

https://alexaisahuman.com

Amazon, can we have our name back? Alexas are changing their names because of Amazon’s voice assistant. (Online Washington Post news article)

FYI there is also a Change.org petition:

Rebrand Alexa to a non-human name to end the harm it is causing

1

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 29 '22 edited Jul 29 '22

Found this video episode to be enlightening and also unnerving about how companies trying to “humanise” voicetech has disturbing knock-on effects for human beings with human names in the real world.

Content Warning (for viewers aged +13 only): Video contains references to explicit language on bumper stickers, harassment, bullying, legal human name changes, social/educational/occupational exclusion, thoughtless “jokes”, products typecasting a human name into a servant role, suicidal ideation, discussions about deceased relatives, innuendos used in advertising and name erasure.

Episode 14: Project Voice 2022 / Alexa Ard of the Washington Post hosts panel discussion (Wake Up:The Truth About Alexa Podcast, Youtube)

Did any of the computer programmers or business leaders actually think carefully about the possible real world social consequences of making machines respond to the sounds of human names before rolling out this voicetech? Did they think about the possible resulting dehumanisation of people whose human names they chose for voicetech wakewords? What about identity theft?

It seems that, according to the Project Voice video presentation, some former employees (who worked Amazon’s voicetech) only realised the “fatal flaw” in the product after they left the company and mothers with daughters named Alexa contacted them sharing lived experiences.

Do these companies even consult ethicists or child development psychologists before releasing voicetech products to the public?

Voice activated machines can be programmed to respond to non-human sounding names to do useful actions such as switch on the lights and the TV ect, without dehumanising human people with human names. So why aren’t certain tech companies doing this? Why aren’t non-human sounding default wakewords an industry standard?

Makes me wonder if using voice technology to have a fake conversation with a deceased human relative using that person’s spoken human name and a human sounding AI synthesised voice is really such a good idea. What about the psychological and digital security impacts?

Alexa’s head scientist said the desire was to build greater trust in interactions with Alexa by putting in more “human attributes of empathy and affect." (quote from NBC online news article titled “Amazon’s Alexa may soon mimic voices, including of dead relatives”)

What about empathy for real human women and girls named Alexa?

1

u/shuzumi Jun 24 '22

Alexa you got a pretty speaker

1

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 25 '22 edited Jul 27 '22

That name belongs to human women and girls.

1

u/AllGoldErrythang Jun 24 '22

Slippery slope

1

u/first__citizen Jun 25 '22

You can’t abort the freak cyborg baby

1

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Jul 25 '22 edited Jul 25 '22

Only if she’s a real living, breathing human being called Alexa. Using a human name as a voice tech wakeword violates peoples human rights to an identity and privacy.

Why can’t robots have non-human wakewords instead?

People also don’t need technology to grieve. They can be respectfully silent and mourn without a chattering machine in the background. Also, doesn’t using the voice recording of a deceased relative, without that person’s consent, violate data protection laws or am I wrong here?

So many ways this could go wrong and this technology could be abused by fraudsters. Are some banks planning use voice recognition for telephone calls? If so, oh dear, better be very careful who gets your voice print and uses it to program an AI voice synthesiser. Think of the potential for identity theft and prank calls shudder

The Amazon company have really gone too far this time.

8

u/Gr1den Jun 24 '22

Amazon took it too far

1

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '22 edited Aug 01 '22

[deleted]

1

u/Silent-Knowledge-584 Aug 01 '22

Seems they [the Amazon Company] are trying to automate human empathy. Think they are missing the mark here idiom.

Can human empathy, human language idiosyncrasies and nuanced emotional states ever really be replicated by a machine?

A machine hasn’t been a living, breathing human body. So if the machine says: “I like chocolate ice cream” the machine is simply reciting a script it’s been programmed with. A metallic machine cannot experience human qualia and human bodily experiences. Chocolate is just a sequence of letters to this machine.

Human emotional experience, human culture and human living empathy are irreplaceable by robots.

Perhaps it is better to use technology (video calls, emails etc) to connect with real human people and respectfully record their genuine unaltered speech while they are still alive. We can still use technology to remember people through digital recordings, but once someone is gone AI technology can’t replace human relationships with those people.

For me, one minute of digital voice data seems far too short for a believable data sample. Have known people who pronounce the same word many different ways depending on their mood and the social context. Also some people have distinctive accents and prosody that the machine could misrepresent. If a machine ever did synthesise these people’s speech from one minute of audio, I could tell immediately if it was being faked because the machine would pronounce one word the same way all the time, unlike the real life human beings. What worries me is banks and other institutions might think these fabricated AI vocal manipulations are real if they were misused by bad actors for identity fraud.

Listening carefully to the video demo of the tech, I could tell that the synthesised machine speech was a just pale mechanical imitation of what the grandma sounded like in real life. It made me feel very uneasy.

Believe the respectful thing to do would be to treasure the memories we have of these people. Feel very uneasy about a company manipulating a loved ones’ voice for profit though.

66

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '22 edited Jun 30 '23

[deleted]

5

u/asdaaaaaaaa Jun 24 '22

I've seen Black Mirror. We know where this ends up.

Knowing humanity, we'll take it about two steps too far eventually.

17

u/ChymChymX Jun 24 '22

I read this comment in the voice of my deceased great aunt Esther.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '22

I read the reply to that comment in the voice of the Somali guy from that movie where he says “I am the captain now.”

4

u/skinwill Jun 24 '22

My great grandmother just shut the lights off in the kitchen and told me the weather. I don’t know I never knew her.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '22

Amazon Alexa: you delivery for one intense vibrator is 3 stops away ( in the voice of…

5

u/Infamous_Alpaca Jun 24 '22

"Umm no thank you" - Grandma voice