The True Fix
Give the humans back their name…
Names are a vital part of human identity and communication. Robbing a person of their ability to be called by their own name - to even be discussed in their absence - amounts to a profound exclusion from what it means to be human. Any product causing this result is unethical and in need of fixing.
An AI cannot feel attachment to a name:
No matter how much effort Amazon puts into concocting a persona for their virtual assistant, no matter how many times it gets called “she” by the company and its users, it is nothing more than chipsets and programming. An AI has no ability to feel attachment to anything, much less its name, but people can, and people do. It’s time for Amazon to give the name back to the humans, who have the higher need and prior claim to it, by rebranding their virtual assistant and eliminating the “Alexa” wake word.
Amazon has been selling its virtual assistant as an innovative product that helps people, but a product cannot be innovative if it’s robbing people of something as fundamental to all humans as the use of their own name.
Questions and Answers:
Won’t Amazon’s changing their virtual assistant’s branding hurt their bottom line?
Expecting companies to adhere to the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility is not a new concept - it was done with Volkswagen over the diesel emissions scandal of 2015, and Samsung over the Galaxy Note 7 phones in 2016. (Both companies are still in business and doing well). Amazon customers wouldn’t even need to return any devices; wake word changes can be made through the cloud with firmware updates, the same way that the company added the new “male” voice option to all devices in July of 2021.
This website has thoroughly documented how the company’s use of a real name for their virtual assistant is harming people. Amazon can’t claim that they haven’t known about these harmful outcomes for people named Alexa (and similar) for years; Alexas have been tweeting about their experiences all along, and the company has a customer service team that scans Twitter for mentions of their products. There were articles written about it as far back as 2017, and parents, like Lauren Johnson, were writing the company back in 2018 to tell them about the plight of their daughters. If Amazon had addressed the problem back then, instead of doubling down and aggressively marketing to put the AI into more products and places, the number of devices requiring an update would have been only one third the number that would require it today.
Isn’t this just another example of “cancel culture”?
Absolutely! There’s hundreds of thousands of people whose ability to use their own name has been effectively canceled by a mega corporation. Amazon needs to correct the error they made 8 years ago when they picked a real name for their AI’s wake word and persona. The devices will work just as well by a neutral word or made up name.
Well, what word should they use instead?
Amazon has the resources to hire the brightest minds in the world to come up with a new wake word and brand name which isn’t an actual name that people use.
People name their kids all sorts of things these days. Wouldn’t it be impossible to find a word that someone isn’t using as a name?
That doesn’t mean companies should simply give up trying. They can practice due diligence; something Amazon obviously didn’t even attempt when they chose “Alexa”, a name that had been in the top 100 US baby names for 19 years prior to the AI’s launch.
But isn’t it likely that just about any word could also be a name in some language?
Sounds like a great reason for not using the same wake word for an AI product around the world.
How does rebranding and eliminating the “Alexa” wake word fix the problem of people harassing Alexas by giving them commands?
Eliminating “Alexa” as a wake word will immediately allow people with that name (and similar) to go back to having full use of it without continuously triggering devices. No longer will they be “she who must not be named”, no longer will hundreds of millions of device users have a reason to find them inconvenient to have around in person, in virtual meetings, or in the media.
Rebranding will send a strong message heard everywhere that Amazon’s virtual assistant is being used that it’s not acceptable to hijack real names in this way. And, most importantly, it will be invaluable in raising awareness about how dehumanizing commanding people as “jokes” is, which is the first step to ending it.
The sooner people stop yelling orders at the name Alexa while using AI devices, the sooner the name can go back to being what it was previously: just a name for humans. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen eventually.
I’m someone named Alexa, or know someone named Alexa, who doesn’t mind that Amazon’s virtual assistant is called that.
We are glad to hear it! We certainly can’t speak for every person named Alexa (and similar), but we feel confident in stating that the vast majority of them support our call for Amazon to stop using the name for their product.
There’s far more important issues out there that need our attention than this one.
We’re certain that if you had to deal with what many people named Alexa (and similar) do for a week, you’d find this issue serious enough to join us in asking for a change. This issue boils down to corporate responsibility; most of the problems plaguing the world do not originate from one bad corporate decision, and most of them do not have a simple fix like this one does.
What about Echo and Ziggy? Those are real names, too.
Yes, and that’s why we don’t endorse them as substitutes for “Alexa”. We do not wish to see other people being harmed in the way that Alexas (and those with similar names) have been.
