A 10-year-old girl was told to touch a live electrical plug with a penny by Amazon's virtual assistant, which is not designed to endanger human lives.
The girl asked for a challenge to do and the suggestion was given out via the smart speaker.
To charge a phone from a wall outlet, touch a penny to the exposed prongs.
An Amazon spokesman told CNBC that the error had been fixed.
The mother of the girl, who lives in the U.S., described the incident in a series of posts on her verified account.
Livdahl wrote that they were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on their foot, from a physical education teacher. There was bad weather outside. She wanted another one.
The girl was suggested to attempt the challenge by the speaker. The challenge was pulled from Our Community Now. The news website did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC and it was not clear how it originally reported on the challenge.
The mother said that she was right there when it happened and that they had a good conversation about not trusting anything from the internet or the voice assistant.
The potentially lethal challenge started appearing on social media platforms around a year ago. The challenge is dangerous because metals conduct electricity and can cause violent electric shocks and fires, with some reports of people losing fingers and hands from taking the challenge.
A spokesman for Amazon told CNBC thatAlexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. We took swift action to fix the error.
Amazon didn't say what the "swift action" was.
Gary Marcus said that the event shows how common sense is still missing in artificial intelligence.
Marcus later told CNBC that no current artificial intelligence is close to understanding the everyday physical or psychological world. We have an approximation to intelligence, not the real thing, and as such it will never be trustworthy. Before we can get to artificial intelligence, we need some fundamental advances.
