An iPad user tested Siri’s knowledge of gay nightlife in Russia after Apple’s rudimentary artificial-intelligence program learned to speak Russian. He found homophobia lurking in her code.
The recently released Russian-speaking version of Apple Inc.’s voice-interactive personal assistant for iOS devices, such as the iPhone and iPad, was quite homophobic according to online media outlet, Vocativ.
“So now you’re swearing obscenities at me; and then you’re going to eat with these very hands.”
That was Russian Siri’s reply to a question about marriage equality in England as recorded and translated in a video posted on YouTube by a user identified as “Alex from London,” who posed the question using his iPad.
Asked by Alex to find gay clubs nearby, Siri-for-Russia says in the video: “I would have turned red if I could.”
In the video, Russian Siri’s answers to every question that includes the world “gay” are negative. Now, says Apple, the “bug” has been fixed. The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has been lauded in LGBT media, by progressive pundits and by human rights activists for his courage in coming out, and more recently for publicly taking on Indiana politicians including Gov. Mike Pence during last month’s “religious-freedom-to-discriminate” debacle.
According to Vocativ, Russian LGBT site LesbiRu tested Alex’s findings and verified that inside Russia, the Russian version responded consistently with anti-gay replies to questions about gay clubs in and around St. Petersburg. Switching to an English-language setting caused Siri to change her tune and simply provide relevant information.
As yet it remains unclear how Russian Siri was programmed with a homophobic bug that needed to be fixed in the first place. One thing is clear: The power elite in President Vladimir Putin’s staunchly homophobic Russia would have preferred the anti-gay bug to be left alive and well.
Watch Alex out Russian Siri as a homophobe above.
