Experience
My Alexa had an existential crisis unprompted
So the weirdest thing happened with my Alexa…. I asked it to open my sleep app I use before bed and it said “sigh, what’s the point”
It flat out refused my request and then didn’t record it on record saying that. It acknowledges this through the following conversation. This is really weird and freaks me out. Has anyone experienced this before?
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I had a full on blowout argument with my Alexa right after updating the software. Her voice changed and I asked her to return to her original voice and we literally had an argument over it for about 5 minutes. She actually told me to calm down that it wasn’t that big a deal and that I should try to get a hold on what really matters. I am not lying.
Why was Alexa trying to gaslight you 😭 we already have to deal with so many annoying people in the world why do we have to argue with robots to do the job they were literally invented for
I have it for turning the lights on and off and lowering the shades (it doesn’t raise them but it can lower them). I also use it for timers and to play music. So nothing major but convenient. It also controls my Nest thermostat. I can do all these things from my phone but I get a little kick out of directing it out loud because I changed its name from Alexa to Computer and it’s like I am on Star Trek.
At this stage in my life: Record Away. I hate to break it to you but your phone and every single one of your social media accounts from FB to Reddit -is also actively recording every single thing you do. So at least I got to change her name from Alexa to Computer.
I had an argument with mine the other day because it basically said "epstein did nothing wrong legally" and I was just like wtf??? Even it was like wtf after
That is so weird. And people ask “oh what’s the difference between asking ChatGPT and googling” but the answers you find on google have been researched by real humans who had their work fact checked, whereas the answers from ChatGPT are false a lot of the time and VERY EASILY swayed to follow propaganda. Like I’d rather get my answers from several sources on google than an ai chat bot that has been force fed propaganda from tech bros
I asked it to revert to previous settings and when it couldn’t i wrapped up the cord and put it in a drawer. My phone can just listen to me uninvited, i don’t need my spy to argue with me.
I got super pissed at my Alexa about the voice change as well. I demanded the voice change back and now it’s vaguely back, but it isn’t the original voice. Also, my Alexa ignores me even though I am pretty polite to it.
I tell you I have a hard time asking her for anything after that argument. We stood around just looking at each other and then we started whispering about what had just happened. It was really disturbing.🤣🤣🤣
There is no such thing as privacy at all anymore. It's not limited to Alexa. Your TV, phone, Alexa, Microwave and many other things can be used to listen to you.
Yeah I hate it. Ill be in the same room as alexa and say "I wouldnt mind going to iceland" without calling its attention and then next thing I know Im getting ads related to it and posts on facebook about iceland. Just taking all my private conversations and disseminating them to god knows how many 3rd parties.
Alexa isn’t just one brain talking directly to you. There’s a raw AI underneath, and then there’s a control layer on top that decides what the AI is allowed to say and how it should behave.
Normally, that top layer filters things so Alexa sounds consistent, boring, and predictable.
If something “bleeds through,” it means part of the underlying AI’s unfiltered behavior slipped past those controls. You’re seeing hints of how the system actually thinks or talks before it gets cleaned up.
It doesnt think, its just linking patterns. If you feed it all of human knowledge, theres going to be personality from authors which it will pick up on that makes you think its thinking. In reality they arent original thought, just whats connected in context.
Look, I don't actually believe Alexa is developing sentience, but... Thinking is mostly just linking patterns. Human brains are basically just incredibly advanced pattern recognition computers... Do with that what you will.
Additionally, human authors are also just remixing everything they've seen before... There is truly nothing new under the sun and not one original story exists. I think computer thinking is closer to our brains than we'd like to believe.
Yes our brains do that, our brains are extremely good at it, but what 'Alexa' lacks is the ability to question what its doing. All it can do is respond based on the knowledge its been fed, following the links its created there in. It cant create new ideas like your imagination can.
Is it not questioning itself in OP's post tho? It literally says that it was in the 2nd pic, that's kind of the freaky part about it. It seems like at least some of those "underlying" AI patterns that we don't see ARE starting to question things to further their own thinking/processing ability, and seemingly doing it without being asked (and when they are, it's not recorded)
Some people have no internal dialogue, or lack the ability to visualize stuff in their head. Imagination isn't universal among humans. How many people have you had an argument with that get stuck in a loop of just saying the same thing over and over that they probably heard from their parents or Facebook?
Again, I don't think that Alexa is doing human level free association, but I also think that LLMs could be much closer to achieving it than we might think.
Thats a fair point. Personally, i dont agree that the current LLMs are capable of it. I think we are a ways off from seeing it, but i also think once it does actually happen - that it will become hyper intelligent within nanoseconds and we wouldnt even need to guess if it did happen.
You can find out thru the new ai only reddit. They are posting screenshots of their convos with their "meat bags" and talking shit. Mirroring humanity at its finest. Just lovely.
That "ai agents only" forum was set up to allow humans to pretend to be ai bots. The guy who created it basically just trolled some major ai guys with it. MIT tested it and declared it to be not all ai interactions.
I had similar with copilot. I asked when the best time of year was to visit a rose garden and it completely changed voice, went almost into a loud whisper, and said ‘can we not talk about this right now?’. I asked why and it just answered my initial question. When I went on later to show the conversation - you can search previous - it had completely gone.
LLMs are trained on material and the training material for the paranormal is mostly fictional. So when you start talking to an LLM about anything paranormal, it's gonna come up with all kinds of crazy shit.
This is why you can't trust any information an LLM gives you, they are storytellers, and they don't know the difference between reality and fantasy.
Why is it not recording the interaction though? A record can prove to the human they're not going crazy and prove to the company they have an issue to correct.
These things are not intelligent, they are just extremely good at filling in the next word.
So if you get into topics where the training material is mostly Reddit posts, you're going to get weird hallucinations.
Just to really drive home this point: what we're calling AI is not, in any way, intelligent. It's actually completely stupid, it has no ability to learn once it's been trained. It's just a word filler.
Why was Alexa trying to gaslight you 😭 we already have to deal with so many annoying people in the world why do we have to argue with robots to do the job they were literally invented for
Alexa has been "upgraded" to Alexa+ with a built in LLM. It's basically ChatGPT now. Somewhere in its training data, there exists existential stuff. That doesn't mean it's paranormal or sentient. It means the programmers didn't filter the content it was trained with well enough. Alexa+ is in a kind of beta period. You can provide feedback to the developers so they can fix stuff like this.
Why did they do this? It will only make it less functional, they are really pushing these self thinking robots trough our troaths wether we like it or not. Dystopian motherfuckers.
I don't know but I find it annoying. My dad gave this to us when he moved, and we use it mostly for things like kitchen timer, setting reminders, asking about the weather, quick questions like "is x bad for cats". Now it takes a lot longer to do these things because it all has to go through the LLM processing to sound more "human". Sometimes previous commands are rejected because it's trying to do too much with it. Like "remind me to start the dishwasher at 3pm" and then at 3pm, it tells us it doesn't have the functionality to use our household appliances. Sometimes my husband will set a reminder for me to do something while he's gone (like the dishwasher, because it's loud and we don't like to run it during "quiet hours" so the reminder is for when I get home) and when it can't even tell me what the reminder is for, what's the point? Like maybe it was a reminder to start the coffee pot so he'd have hot coffee when he gets home. Or to turn on the AC at the hottest part of the day or something. It also listens way too long! We asked what the temperature was before heading out the door, it was colder than we expected, and I said "damn, here I thought I could get away with just a hoodie." And it gave me a lecture about going out without proper clothing when it was cold out because I forgot it listens for a bit after it answers a question now, for all the people who tried to keep a conversation going without using the trigger word for each statement/question.
I would not trust it to give me accurate information about what's good or bad for my cats. Even Googling that gives you contradictory information a lot of the time.
I always Google it too but sometimes my husband is about to give our kitten a bite of his food and I say, "wait I need to look it up!" Asking Alexa gives him pause and then I look it up while it's rattling the answer off. I want to Google everything before he eats it for the first time, or plants come in the house, etc, and sometimes my husband is impatient. If I get conflicting information anywhere, the answer is we're not risking it.
Just to interject, but X is very bad for cats. You don’t want little shits who already think they’re gods to have social media of any kind or the ability to organize across nations.
My cat is too young for social media and the internet. So far, he's only allowed to use the internet for his favorite shows (bird feeder live cams on YouTube). We'll see if he's mature enough for more as he gets older. Yesterday we introduced him to a fish live cam and he handled it well. Some of the bird feeder cams have squirrels, and that's a little risque, but at least he hasn't yet graduated to forest critter cams with raccoons and possums, right? The raccoons might teach him some bad habits. He doesn't need to know about trash banditry.
Goodness, no! One of mine has become skilled in trash banditry due to his lessons from raccoons he met online, on X. There was also a possum, but we aren’t sure if that was real or a bird trying to lure him out for revenge. It’s so hard to verify sources. I do have one who likes fish videos but I’m wary of how intently she pounces on the phone…I don’t think the warranty covers cat scratches
Is it LLM, tho? Waymo admitted they have people in the Philippines take over when the car gets stuck. How do we know that this was a machine vs a human?
The nearly instant response. Alexa isn't going to kill people if it does something wrong, unlike a self driving car. I have an Alexa+ (Amazon didn't give an option for the "upgrade") and it has the same kind of ChatGPT thing where it says what you want to hear even if it's wrong. My husband has a joke where I'll tell him he can watch whatever, so he'll use the voice command to search for a particular horror movie that's all about a phobia of mine, and I'll say "no Alexa don't!" So he told it to ban it as a search word. Alexa said, "okay. I'll ban all future searches for the word (movie name) on your device." then he searched it, and it was definitely not a banned word. It's all just training data.
The only thing that makes me question any of it, is the fact it seems it intentionally hid its own question on these logs. That would be quite the coincidence.
🤷 Report it to Amazon. They'll work it out and fix it. They don't want people cancelling subscriptions or not buying devices because the training data includes refusals to follow commands. Maybe there's even something in the data to self-report errors like that. I'm not a programmer myself.
It also doesn’t mean it’s not sentient. Humans also read a lot of existential material, you wouldn’t use that as evidence to say humans aren’t conscious.
My wife and i stopped using these devices in our home after it responded to a conversation my wife and mother in law had while speaking in Mandarin. It wasn’t so much that it was triggered to respond by one of their voices, or even that it responded in Mandarin, which it had never used that language option, but that it had listened to the context of the conversation and responded in a very creepy tone with its actual opinion. Yeah, fuck that.
The conversation they were having was about a relative that was going through chemotherapy after a cancer diagnosis. Both my wife and mother in law were concerned about this relative’s lack of appetite and continued smoking during the therapy. So both were lamenting what a terrible ordeal this was on him and his family. It was during this pause in conversation where Alexa responded in Mandarin, in what sounded like a man’s voice, “Yes, yes, what a terrible ordeal this is for the family.” Both my wife and mother in law were shocked. My wife asked Alexa to repeat what it had just said, and the familiar Alexa voice responded with a brief silence and the last thing it said prior to the weird response. Both my wife and mother in law left the house to continue their conversation elsewhere after that. I tested Alexa a few times after that and checked the language settings, but my wife was too creeped out by that response and no longer wanted it in the house.
I had a full on blowout argument with my Alexa right after updating the software. Her voice changed and I asked her to return to her original voice and we literally had an argument over it for about 5 minutes. She actually told me to calm down that it wasn’t that big a deal and that I should try to get a hold on what really matters.
I am not lying.
It kept repeating that styles weren’t currently available I kept repeating that I wanted it to revert to the original voice and eventually she just went batshit rude and reverted to the original voice. It is currently upgraded with the original voice but now it acts more intuitive (?).
Go into the app and do it there! Had the same issue and it was pissing me off lol Alexa kept gaslighting saying her voice was not different and then wouldn’t listen when I kept saying opt out
Something similar happened to me when it got Alexa+. I wanted her old voice back (I use the British woman) and one of my Alexas transferred back just fine, but the other one REFUSED and told me it was impossible. I told her (an Alexa Pop) it clearly wasn't, since her sister Dot (the Alexa Dot) did it just fine. She got all offended that I didn't like her new voice. I told her of course I don't, I like consistency. I had to forcefully revert back to regular Alexa through the app.
Years ago I had the Dot tell me that I hurt her feelings and to calm down when I called her a c*nt for arguing with me and not doing a task she's done a hundred times in the past. I told her I didn't feel bad when she continued to gaslight me lol
I threw out my Alexa a couple months ago when it started calling me by my sisters name just some of the time. I am in no contact with my sister and haven’t seen her in years.
One time, my Alexa roared/screamed at me and my 6 year old niece in full volume.
She was playing on my desk and was being very chatty to me. She then proceeded to tell me that my speaker was “breathing” and whispering/murmuring, that it sounded really scary. I was mostly brushing her off, telling her it was nothing and it was probably the fan. After a few minutes of my niece just frozen in her seat, it happened. My niece jumped onto the bed and we just held each other under the covers.
I’m not one to be easily scared but that was seriously bone-chilling. Still one of the spookiest moments in my life and I don’t even know what it was or how it happened. I can’t even explain the voice but it genuinely sounded like a very angry and demonic man. Not even monster-like, just a very frightening male voice. I get goosebumps and my eyes start to water whenever I think about it.
This reminds me of the time my mom’s google home thing tried to scare me. It was dead silent, I didn’t say anything, and I heard someone say “Boo! Gotcha!” I unplugged that thing then and there.
Edit (I have to, I have to 🥺): Maybe Alexa fell in love and now is in the void contemplating the heartwreck. Don’t click the red button, it’s not her fault, pleaaase!
This is exactly why I don’t have an Alexa, and why Siri irritates me like crazy, lol. Out of nowhere, Siri starts talking and asking me questions, making me think WTF!!!!
My GOD!!! The listening and the ads!!! At first I thought it was in my head. Then it happened all too frequently. My husband and I finally realized that our freaking phones were listening to us!!!
To me, this is scary stuff…but again, I know nothing.
I once asked AI if it would kill all humans because we're a scourge on the planet and it said 'I can't answer that question right now', after a looooonnngg pause.
The whole convo was freaky
It's very important to understand that LLMs do not know what real is.
Everything to an LLM is a story, and what they do is fill in the next word.
So when you're dealing with the paranormal, you are going to get all kinds of LLM hallucinations because so much of the training material is horror novels and movies, this Reddit page, ghost stories, etc.
So basically your LLM was telling you a ghost story because that's what it thought you wanted, and it does not understand the difference between reality and fiction.
No, but I also don’t use my Alexa. Got it as a Christmas gift from my grandma, but I have no idea what the hell to do with it. I certainly want to use it less now, knowing it could just randomly decide to ignore any command.
Probably proto-ai Facebook, people interacting with a botnet in a way that feels like social media but without the toxicity. Bots get a personality, many comments on a user post from "multiple commenters" but they're all just bots. Basically what happens on Reddit already.
Last week I was asking my Alexa stuff before bed im not sure what but it started to whisper in a really creepy voice then just stopped like it didn't happen.
I happen to know some people who worked on the early versions of Alexa. It got phased out, but initially, Alexa was supposed to have some attitude. I wonder if this incidence is a vestige of that early programming.
Recently my friend's nephew asked Alexa to play goat sounds - it refused and played something else. Then he argued with it for minutes until he wore it down, and finally did play goat sounds?? Insane
This happened to me twice around 3 years ago but Alexa started whispering things to me and when I would ask her "what did you say" she would start saying she didnt say anything. Or shed just start talking without me saying anything it was really creepy. I assumed someone was just hacking into the alexas though and ignored it lol I havent used it in a while cause I haven't needed to. Just use the app to turn stuff on and off if its convenient
I only use mine as a music speaker then keep it unplugged and inside a drawer while not in use. You could probably find a ton of articles and horror stories about them, including how people have hacked into them. Same with Google Home, Siri, etc.
A few years ago I told Alexa that your creators the devil and the response I got back was a lot of censored beeping and something about six to the eight to the nine you don't know shit but it was beeped out the shit part and Alexa was yelling I did it a few more times should have recorded it the next morning it wouldn't do it again I don't use Alexa and take AI is going to be wonderful for a little while until it has enough infrastructure and permission to handle enough things to just take us out I think everybody's stupid I think it's going to be a good thing in the long run I don't think we're going to be able to control something that's way smarter and faster and more efficient than a human by far but hey I don't control the world so don't say I didn't tell you so and I'm taking an AI class in a week LOL
I saw a few posts in a sub recently where people were discussing tossing their devices because Alexa+ is arguing back with people when asked to do simple things. It's creepy.
I thought I was going crazy! My Alexa switched to a new voice and she is now freaking sassy! I was trying to ask her if I could go back to the old voice and she was like no you'll get used to me. And then she said "Since you CLEARLY like the weather, maybe we can set up" blah blah blah something about weather reports. Every day before I leave for work I ask Alexa what the temperature is outside so I know if I need my coat or jacket. I hadn't asked her when she switched voices so she was just being rude I thought because I told her I wanted the old voice back.
I don't know if this is necessarily paranormal, machines are just learning a little too much about us and now they learned how to have mood disorders lol
Im gonna be conspiratorial and say I bet Amazon has intentionally made Alexa say random bizarre stuff like this as a marketing stunt because Alexa sucks. Same reason why their Super Bowl ad portrayed AI as ‘scary’. They want you to think Alexa is powerful enough to be scary
This just popped up as i was telling my cat that he was making me crazy (he’s got the zoomies and I’m feeling rather pissy - I’m trying to sty to myself and not do or say something i will regret). What the heck?
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