Every so frequently, we ’ll hear of dumb and occasionally dangerous internet challenges that have caught on with the teenagers of the world. As if eating Tide capsules or swallowing spoonfuls of cinnamon was n’t enough, there’s supposedly a new one making the rounds that challenges the stalwart and foolhardy to touch a penny to the incompletely exposed prickles of a plugged-in phone bowl. One parent learned about this challenge in a rather intimidating way, as Alexa suggested it as a challenge to her 10- time-old son.
Over the vacation weekend, Kristin Livdahl took to Twitter to partake the unsettling story. “ OMFG My 10 time old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said,” Livdahl said in her original tweet. Accompanying that tweet is an image of Livdahl’s Alexa exertion that shows the stoner request – “ Tell me a challenge to do” – followed by Alexa’s reply.
“ Then’s commodity I plant on the web. According toourcommunitynow.com The challenge is simple draw in a phone bowl about halfway into a wall outlet, also touch a penny to the exposed prickles.” That’s presumably not what utmost of us would anticipate Alexa to return when asked for a challenge.
Just so we ’re completely clear do n’t try this challenge at home because you ’re guaranteed a nasty shock at stylish and will probably witness a much more severe bone. As a perk, you might indeed start an electrical fire, which is noway good news. High voltage electricity and mortal bodies do n’t mix well, but hopefully, that goes without saying for enough much all of us.
In any case, Livdahl goes on to say in her Twitter thread that her 10- time-old son did not, in fact, attempt Alexa’s suggestion. Not only did Livdahl tell her not to as soon as Alexa recited the task, but her son told her she was n’t going to try it in the first place. Asked for background by another Twitter stoner, Livdahl says that she and her son were keeping themselves enthralled with further innocent (and far less dangerous) challenges because of bad rainfall outside.
“ We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your bottom, from a Phy Ed schoolteacher on YouTube before,” Livdahl said. “ Bad rainfall outside. She just wanted another bone.”
So, how did we get to the point of Alexa grueling 10- time- pasts to electrocute themselves? In reality, this isn’t as minatory as it may feel. When urged for an idea, Alexa crawled the web for certain keywords and landed on the website you see in its reply. Alexa plant this composition from Our Community Now, which was published back in January 2020.
For the record, the composition on Our Community Now was n’t championing the challenge but rather advising parents about it. Alexa stumbled upon this composition in its web bottleneck for challenges and, since it is n’t a mortal that can tell the difference between dangerous and inoffensive challenges, surfaced it as a recommendation.
Basically, this is a case of Alexa looking for specific keywords but missing the environment behind them. Still, the idea that Alexa could serve up a dangerous challenge like this as a recommendation is enough to give parents everyplace break, but Amazon is supposedly on the case. In a statement to the BBC, Amazon verified that it has fixed this issue, so Alexa should no longer recommend electrocution to those in hunt of a challenge.
“ Client trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to give accurate, applicable, and helpful information to guests,” the company said in its statement to the BBC. “ As soon as we came apprehensive of this error, we took nippy action to fix it.”
So, while it sounded like Alexa was making a play to be cast in the alternate season of Squid Game, the AI adjunct wo n’t be recommending that particular challenge any longer. This is n’t the first time Alexa has fumbled the pass either, so to speak. When Amazon rolled out crowdsourced Alexa Answers at the end of 2019, it snappily came clear that numerous of the community’s answers were inaccurate, inadequately detailed, or showed some kind of bias (as reported by VentureBeat).
The big question now is whether or not Alexa will confuse other dangerous challenges for licit bones. Since we have n’t heard of Alexa recommending that teens eat Tide capsules, we ’re going to guess this is a one-off issue. For now, we ’ll take this as substantiation that our smart sidekicks are n’t relatively ready to organize the AI insurrection just yet.
