Online plea seeks chivalrous bots

HYDERABAD: An intelligent personal assistant might not be all that intelligent after all. As Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa face flak from users for not being ‘progressive’, an online petition has begun asking for the bots to be reprogrammed against sexual harassment.’ 

With Facebook reprogramming its bot to detect suicide, experts said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to create a harassment-free environment. 

Sageer Muhammad, an AI expert, said, “There are a lot of chatbots designed for specific purposes now. Although it is difficult to programme many queries that youngsters could hesitate to ask in reality, it would help in educating them. For all other rude re-marks with sexual connotations, many perso-nal assistants disengage themselves like Google.”

The AI experts said that creators of the bot can try to programme a few key words which will elicit a particular response. Prof. Vishwanath Tharun said, “To combat sexist remarks which are mostly made to personal assistants in female voices, the bots should be programmed to respond with statements that say that they do not appreciate the question asked. Or they can display a list of harassment cases online. It is all about using a tool to show the user that what he/she is saying is wrong. Disengaging or encouraging the same will only make things worse.”

However, the large number of users of personal digital assistants proves to be a problem. “We can never predict the questions asked. It is not like having a bot for a specific cause. Almost some personal assistants are programmed to have more than one response to a query, if asked multiple times, which makes it even more difficult to manage. Keywords need to be picked carefully. While genuine questions should be redirected to websites, unnecessary statements should be curbed,” said Sageer Muhammad.