When a 10-year-old girl asked for a challenge, Amazon's Alexa gave her a potentially lethal response.
The girl was told to play with a live wall outlet by her mom, who described it in a thread.
The challenge is easy, said Alexa. Touch a penny to the exposed prongs after plugging in a phone charge about halfway into a wall outlet.
Had the 10-year-old not known better or if her parent hadn't been around, these instructions could have caused serious harm. As a child, you might have learned that putting metals into a sockets can cause electric shocks or start fires.
Amazon asked her to reach out directly so it could investigate. The retail giant told Indy 100 that it had fixed the issue.
An Amazon spokesman said that customer trust is at the center of everything they do. We took swift action to fix the error.
It is important to know that the instructions given to the young girl by the digital assistant were life threatening. The response from the assistant was taken from a post on our communitynews.com about a year ago, when a challenge was circulating on social media.
Teens were dared to put a coin into a wall outlet. At least a few people followed the dangerous instructions in the brain-dead internet challenges. The Massachusetts police sent out a warning after two teenagers were accused of setting fire to their high school.
Some people may wonder why anyone would own a product like that. As the weather got colder, Livdahl asked her gift to her, the Echo, for suggestions on what to do with it.
Livdahl says she will enable the kids mode on her Echo so she has more control over the speaker.
Something so dangerous could come from the mouth of a product released by one of the biggest tech companies in the world. We don't know why this happened, but it's clear that Amazon's algorithms aren't doing a good enough job of vetting the information they grab from various online sources. That is not the case with other personal assistants.
The fun thought exercises presented by the Google Assistant seemed to be custom responses rather than something from a random website. Here are some of the challenges that the company has.
You have found a magic movie ticket that will let you become a character in any movie, but it is a one-way ticket. Pick your movie and character.
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You still love it even though you weren't super enough to join a superhero squad. Tell us about your power and we can come up with a story about it.
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You can create a new national holiday. What date does it fall, what is it called, and what does it celebrate?
If privacy concerns weren't enough to convince you against using Amazon's voice assistant, its ability to spread harmful, even deadly, information will make you pull the plug on Alexa.
