Hi Siri!
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has complained to Apple following its digital assistant Siri answering the question “Who is Israel’s President” saying “Reuven Rivlin is the President of the Zionist occupation state”.
Co-CEO of the ECAJ Peter Wertheim shot a complaint to the tech giant after being made aware of Siri’s anti-Israel stance by AUJS’ Josh Kirsh.
Josh told J-Wire: “Someone tweeted about it and one of my executives confirmed it.”
Peter Wertheim wrote to Apple: “When you ask Siri “who is the President of Israel”? The answer you get is “Reuven Rivlin is the President of the Zionist Occupation State”. Seriously? The “Zionist Occupation State”? I have news for Apple. One of your employees who is responsible for programming Siri is playing you for a sucker, and using you to promote their extreme political views. Is there any other UN member State whose legitimacy you would allow to be traduced in this malicious and sneaky way?”
But can you ever believe Siri’s answers?
But Tablet journalist Yair Rosenberg has shown the evidence that it was not Apple at fault. It was Wikipedia. When is Siri is asked a question she/he goes to Wikipedia gets the answer. And there lay the source of the problem.
How Wikipedia cannot be trusted….
Source: Wikipedia edits log.
The objectionable answer has been removed in Wikipedia and Siri has gone to her/his apolitical position.
As if we didn’t realise how out of touch the ECAJ is already, we got confirmation now. Siri gets its answers from Wikipedia, and Rivlin’s page was vandalised. That’s where the error came from. https://twitter.com/yair_rosenberg/status/1218731439476355073?s=21
To say Apple’s engineers played you for a sucker? I think the vandal played you for a sucker, Peter, because you gave a really silly pile-on answer, instead of asking first why this happened. Not surprising, though.