People laughed at Amazon’s Alexa when it was discovered that asking a question regarding Kamala Harris would give you a good positive answer, but asking about Trump would give you a negative answer. We were told that this was corrected, and in fact, if such questions are asked now, Alexa will simply reply that she cannot respond to questions of a political nature.
But what constitutes a political question? I decided to find out. So I asked Alexa to tell me about Kamala Harris‘s tax policy. She responded that she found the following information from a website. Alexa then proceeded for at least 2 1/2 minutes extolling the wonderful virtues of Kamala Harris‘s tax policy — except that it was blatantly partisan garbage and factually incorrect. For example, Alexa described how Harris strongly believed that lower capital gains rates are needed for economic growth. Therefore, she is proposing to reduce the capital gains rate from Biden’s proposal of nearly 50% to a mere 28%. But this is an utter lie! The Capital gains rate is currently 20% and has been since the Obama Administration. Harris’s proposal actually raises the capital gains rate to 33%, despite the fact that she knows it will hurt economic growth.
I then asked Alexa to tell me about Donald Trump’s tax policy. Alexa simply replied, “sorry I don’t have any information about that.” Nevermind the fact that he was a US President for four years and has been a candidate for President for two election cycles!
It is clear that Amazon is disingenuously building partisan politics into its Alexa app, despite its protestations that it is not doing so.