It is very hard to imagine a situation where forcing a metal coin into an electrical socket is going to be a good idea Alexa. What were you thinking? Photo / Getty Images
It is very hard to imagine a situation where forcing a metal coin into an electrical socket is going to be a good idea Alexa. What were you thinking? Photo / Getty Images
A mother was left in shock and dismay when her Alexa home smart assistant recommended that her child attempt a potentially dangerous TikTok challenge.
The communication breakdown between the child and the virtual assistant seems to have occurred when the youngster asked Alexa to suggest a "challenge".
Alexa, which is an Amazon product, is designed to be the digital equivalent of a personal assistant. She can give reminders, answer questions and even sing you Happy Birthday if you ask her.
In a tweet posted on Sunday, Kristin Livdahl shared a screenshot of her Alexa device making the ill-advised suggestion. The post has now gone viral, with more than 10,000 likes on Twitter.
It seems that Alexa made the suggestion to Livdahl's 10-year-old daughter when she asked Alexa to recommend a fitness challenge that she could try.
In the photo, posted alongside the tweet, Alexa recommends: "Here's something I found on the web," it suggested, per the Twitter screenshot. "According to ourcommunitynow.com: The challenge is simple: Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs."
Alexa, which is an Amazon product, is designed to be the digital equivalent of a personal assistant. Photo / Getty Images
It is very hard to imagine a situation where forcing a metal coin into an electrical socket is going to be a good idea Alexa. What were you thinking? Well, she wasn't. Using a complicated algorithm to search for some combination of "home" and "challenge" somehow led to results for the so-called "Penny challenge" which had a moment of reckless popularity a few years ago.
The TikTok trend, which involves the aforementioned combination of a metal coin and electrical socket, led to electrical socket damage and sparks, which in some cases led to fires.
Interestingly, the actual search result that Alexa referenced was one in which parents were warning each other about the dangers of the challenge.
According to Amazon, Alexa uses Bing as her default search engine, but is able to learn from her mistakes through "machine learning".
"Our customers want Alexa to get smarter and more helpful to them every day," the site notes. "To do that, we use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems using machine learning."
Algorithms are smart, but they are not faultless, as this mishap shows. Amazon was quick to reach out over the incident.
"Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," an Amazon spokesman told The Post in a statement. "As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.'"
Hopefully Alexa learns her lesson and doesn't try this again.
Safety advisory: the challenge referred to in this article should not be attempted under any circumstances, by anyone.
