Alexa Challenged a 10-Year-Old Girl to Electrocute Herself. Often, we hear news concerning Dumb and dangerous internet challenges that teenager of the world is caught on to. Well, Amazon Alexa, unfortunately, one day suggested one of these dumb challenges to a 10-year-old girl, and her parent learned about it. And this became a problem for Amazon Alexa.
Alexa Challenged a 10-Year-Old Girl to Electrocute Herself
During the holiday weekend, Kristin Livdahl went on Twitter to share this story that is quite upsetting. According to Slashgear, she stated on twitter that “OMFG my 10-year-old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said.” Accompanying that tweet is an image of Livdahl’s Alexa Activity that shows details of the user request – “Tell me a challenge to do” followed by the reply given by Alexa.
“Here’s something that I discovered on the web. As stated by ourcommunitynow.com: The challenge is simple: Plug in your charger about halfway into a wall outlet, and then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.” That is not something that is expected of Alexa when you as for a challenge.
It is best that you do not try this challenge at home because you would definitely get a really bad shock at best. And, you probably would experience a much more severe one. As a bonus, you actually might even spark a fire or something worse.
Twitter Thread
In any case, Livdahl goes to state on a twitter thread that her 10-year-old daughter did not attempt to try out the Alexa challenge. She stated that her daughter told her that she was not going to try the challenge to begin with. Asked why they started looking for challenges in the first place by other Twitter users, Livdahl stated that she and her daughter were keeping themselves busy with more innocent challenges due to the bad weather outside.
“they were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a phy Ed teacher on YouTube earlier,” Livdahl stated. “Bad weather outside. She just wanted a different challenge.”
When asked for an idea, Alexa crawled through the web for certain keywords and landed on the website you see in its reply. Alexa discovered an article from Our Community Now that was published in January 2020.
The article that was posted on Our Community Now was not promoting the challenge but was to warn parents about the challenge. Alexa saw the article in its web crawl for challenges and, since it is not a human, and cannot tell if the challenge was innocuous or dangerous to try, it brought it up as a recommendation.
Amazon Alexa Update Fix Issue
Essentially, this is a point where Alexa would be looking for certain keywords but missing the context behind them. The fact that Alexa can bring up a challenge like this is a recommendation is something that might give parent everywhere a pause. Well, in a statement that given to BBC, Amazon confirmed that they have fixed the issue, so Alexa would no longer bring up electrocution to those that are searching for challenges.
Amazon stated to BBC that “Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers.” The further stated that “As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.”
