Religion happens to be one of the most sensitive topics of r most people. People want recognition of what they believe in or what they don’t believe in, which in turns affects how they relate to others. Religion like most things in life is centered on personalities who started them. While those believers in different religion would want people to have the same opinion about their favorite personality, most people don’t.
Those are opposed to a certain religion for example will often try to speak negatively the main personality associated with it. On the other hand, those who believe in that religion will glorify the person who is associated with its founding. It’s with that in mind that a recent discovery about Google Home not being able to answer questions about Jesus caused a storm on social media.
Some people had tried had posed questions about Jesus to the Google’s Home AI device, but it wasn’t able to provide any specific answers. However, when they questioned it about other notable religious figure such as Buddha and Muhammad, it was able to provide them with correct answers. To prove and share their interesting findings, they took videos of the device declining to provide an answer, and posted them on social media. It wasn’t long before word went round about that abnormally, and Google had to react to prevent a backlash from some of its users.
Most people argued that Google was trying to be politically correct, or that it simply lacked respect for Jesus or God. They argued that if it could provide accurate information about who Buddha is or who Muhammad is, or even Satan, then it should do the same with Jesus. However, in a tweet, the company explained the answers that Google Assistant Home was giving were from the web. The answer weren’t programmed into Home, but were what it could pull from the top Google search engine results.
Furthermore, they said that they had cut the information about “Who is Jesus Christ,” to ensure respect, and not to disrespect Jesus. They explained further that content on topics such as religion is highly vulnerable to spam and vandalism. That makes popular religious personalities such as Jesus open to slander. To address the issue, Google decided to cut out results to answers about other prominent personalities such as Buddha and Muhammad.
They concluded that when the Google Home Assistant detects that there might be some vulnerability it won’t respond. Such is the case with the answers to most sensitive religious questions or personalities. Temporarily disabling responses to such questions is one of the ways Google uses to avoid slander on important social and religious figures, and therefore stay in the good books of its users.
Experienced users may have noted that the problem isn’t limited to Google’s Home Assistant. Actually, the underlying cause is the “featured Snippets” that uses a search algorithm to give an answer that appears to be the best one. In some cases, it’s never the case, which can be misleading if you don’t have access to the rest of the answers the algorithm didn’t include in its featured answer.
Overall, just with other technologies, AI is still in its crude stages and it will be a while before we can rely on it. For now, we just have to hope that giants such as Google will be responsible enough to share with users the various limitations of AI in their products.
Follow Us
