Yandex explained the strange answer of “Alice” about the heroine of “Masha and the Bear”

MOSCOW, 4 AprilAn incorrect answer from “Alice” about the heroine of the cartoon “Masha and the Bear” is an isolated case; now the smart speaker does not respond like that, the Yandex press service said.
On Wednesday, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in In St. Petersburg, Anna Mityanina expressed concern about the uncontrolled influence of information technology on children, citing as an example the answer of the “Alice” column to a question about the popular cartoon “Masha and the Bear.”

In particular, in response to the child’s question about why Masha lives alone, the column replied that “she is just the ghost of a murdered girl, which is why she does not grow and only animals can see her. The parents could not bear the loss of the child and left, leaving an empty house. And Masha is torturing the bear because he took her life.»

As explained in Yandex, in isolated cases Alice may answer such a question incorrectly, but now she does not give such answers. The company advised turning on children's mode when communicating with “Alice” in order to protect the child from unwanted content.
They also noted that “Alice” regularly learns something new, including when communicating with its owner. For some of the questions to which “Alice” does not have her own answers, she takes information from open sources.

Disturbing

The Commissioner for Children's Rights in St. Petersburg, Anna Mityanina, cited the situation with «Alice» as an example, expressing concern about the uncontrolled influence of information technology on children.

Mityanina also negatively assessed the animated series «Skibidi Toilet» posted on YouTube «, where the characters are represented by entities in the form of heads without bodies located inside moving toilets.
“Now this is presented as an eternal struggle between good and evil. Children 7-8 years old are looking forward to the new series and ask their parents to buy them toys that depict the characters of this bacchanalia. The most popular video has 297 million views,” the children’s ombudsman complained.

«The main problem is the quality of information distributed uncontrollably. There is a lot of garbage, and this garbage, spreading instantly, is presented as the ultimate truth, is uncontrollable in nature. How will children's consciousness react to this. .. it is very difficult to predict. If a child is in a psychologically difficult situation for himself, the result is generally unpredictable,» Mityanina emphasized.

Over 77 million users

In published in In February, Yandex's annual report stated that the monthly audience of the Alice voice assistant was 77.1 million users.

It noted that the voice assistant receives 5.2 billion requests every month. «Alice» has a 78% share of the Russian virtual assistant market.
In addition, the company has launched beta testing of the new «Alice», in which you no longer need to launch a separate skill to access the YandexGPT 2 neural network.