A 10-year-old girl asked Alexa voice assistant to give her a challenge that she could do. But she and her family had the shock of their lives when the artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted devised posed a life-threatening “challenge” for them.
The smart speaker said: “Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”
Amazon has stated that the “error” got fixed as soon as the incident came to their knowledge.
According to the BBC, the incident was described by the girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, on Twitter.
She wrote: “We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one.”
The echo speaker presented the suggestions of partaking in the challenge that it “found on the web”.
Livdahl tweeted that she intervened, yelling: “No, Alexa, no!”
She also mentioned that her daughter was too smart to do something like that.
The company has updated Alexa to prevent the assistant from recommending such activity in the future, Amazon told the BBC in a statement.
“Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers,” Amazon stated.
A year ago, a risky and dangerous activity went viral, namely “the penny challenge”. It circulated on TikTok and other social media websites.
“I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms,” Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, had told The Press in Yorkshire in 2020.
“The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt,” he said.
Meanwhile, fire officials in the US have also raised their voices against the so-called challenge.
