🌵Amazon's New AI: A Privacy Wild West
AI's Legal and Ethical Challenges | Edition #190
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🌵Amazon's New AI: A Privacy Wild West
Earlier today, Amazon launched its new AI model, Nova Sonic. According to the company, it unifies speech understanding and speech generation in a single model, with the goal of enabling more human-like voice conversations in AI-powered applications.
Amazon also highlighted that “Nova Sonic even understands the nuances of human conversation, including the speaker’s natural pauses and hesitations, waiting to speak until the appropriate time, and gracefully handling barge-ins.”
In today's edition, I discuss what Amazon's new model means for the current state of the privacy and AI compliance debate, and how much we should worry about the future of AI.
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If you have been following Amazon's history, from an online bookstore to one of the world's most powerful online empires, including e-commerce, subscription, advertising, Amazon Web Services, and more, you know that personal data collection and deep personalization are at the core of many of its products and services.
With its new AI model, the company seems to have taken personalization to a new extreme: the AI not only understands what the person is saying but also how the person speaks, capturing many more nuances of the person's communication style.
It's certainly not surprising that part of its AI business offering involves unrestricted personal data collection, personalization, ecosystem integration, and voice-based technology, especially given the success of Alexa, Amazon's AI assistant.
From a business perspective, it's probably a smart strategy. Amazon, one of the world's most powerful tech companies, is doing what it knows how to do well: generate profit.
From privacy and AI compliance perspectives, however, Amazon's announcement makes me wonder if the company forgot the privacy and dark patterns fines it received from the Federal Trade Commission in 2023, as well as the still pending record $812 million fine imposed by Luxembourg's data protection authority.
Amazon's announcement also makes me wonder if we are still in the Wild West.
Why? For the following reasons: