Amazon’s Alexa functions as an interactive voice assistant, allowing you to check the weather, launch your favorite playlist, and perform various other functions. Alexa is available in many Amazon products. Besides general commands, it can be integrated into Smart Home products to make life easier.
The controversy started when Amazon announced some advancements in their Alexa model last week. Amazon named it AlexaLLM, which will use users’ conversations for training without their consent.
“Users would be volunteering their voice data and conversations for Amazon’s LLM training purposes,” said David Limp on Bloomberg TV. Users must agree with this to use a more customized version of Alexa.
This was later clarified by Amazon’s spokesperson “Amazon has always believed that training Alexa with real-world requests is essential to delivering an experience to customers that’s accurate and personalized and constantly getting better. But in tandem, we give customers control over whether their Alexa voice recordings are used to improve the service, and we always honor our customer preferences when we train our models.”
It’s unclear how much voice data is necessary to train Amazon’s models and to what degree it may be used for other purposes. So, people should get serious about how their data is being used and which purposes it is being utilized for. Amazon has already faced many accusations about consumer data sharing.
“I don’t think we should accept that Amazon needs to retain those data for product improvement, and consumers often don’t understand what that means. They need affirmative opt-in confirmation to join these programs instead of being set at default,” said John Davisson, the director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Amazon has been charged by FTC for mishandling user data in collaboration with third-party contractors. The FTC has alleged that Amazon Ring’s customer videos were accessed and downloaded by a third-party contractor based in Ukraine, even though it was not necessary.
Till now, many cases have arisen where users’ data is used to train different AI models, but no proper solution has been found so far. One good step by Amazon is that its users can opt out of having their data shared and used for AlexaLLM training.
You can learn more about all Alexa Large language models (LLMs) here.
