Incident 778: Amazon's Alexa Reportedly Shows Political Preference Error in Trump-Harris Presidential Race Queries

Description: Amazon's Alexa was found to provide politically biased responses when asked about the 2024 presidential candidates. It refused to give reasons to vote for Donald Trump, citing neutrality, while offering detailed endorsements for Kamala Harris. Amazon labeled the discrepancy an "error" and reportedly corrected it.

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Alleged: Amazon developed an AI system deployed by Alexa Device Owners, which harmed Alexa Device Owners , Donald Trump presidential campaign and Donald Trump supporters.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

778

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-09-04

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Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Alexa endorses Kamala Harris, refuses to talk about Trump

theregister.com

Amazon’s Alexa favored Harris over Trump after AI upgrade

washingtonpost.com

theregister.com · 2024

It would be perfectly reasonable to expect Amazon's digital assistant Alexa to decline to state opinions about the 2024 presidential race, but up until recently, that assumption would have been incorrect.

When asked to give reasons to vote …

washingtonpost.com · 2024

Software intended to make Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa smarter was behind a viral incident in which the digital helper appeared to favor Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, internal documents obtained by The Washington Post show.

Artificial …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.