Although just about everyone we know uses at least one of their products or services, it’s hard to find a more widely derided company than Amazon.
And one of the reasons is the speed that many of their customers now rely on comes at the expense of the well-being of their employees, as these workers have made clear in videos that show what it’s like to work on the tech giant’s front lines.
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Aside from the labor concerns, some critics of Amazon also cite privacy concerns that are typical of many of the world’s major tech companies.
But while Amazon is sadly far from the only major conglomerate to have these problems, one mom’s complaint concerned a much more unique and bizarre issue that arose after her daughter interacted with its signature Alexa AI.
On Boxing Day, a woman named Kristin Livdahl tweeted out a screenshot of a conversation her 10-year-old daughter had with Alexa while using an Amazon Echo device.
Apparently feeling bored, the girl asked Alexa to tell her “a challenge to do” and the response it came up with made Livdahl feel lucky she happened to be in the room at the time.
As we can see, it told the girl to plug a phone charger halfway into an electrical outlet and then touch a coin to the exposed prongs.
It also gave her a 20-second time limit to complete what should be an obviously harmful challenge.
According to People , this is actually an idea that Livdahl had some experience with because her brother once severely burned his hand after trying something similar.
This time, however, she was able to intervene and quickly told her child not to do what Alexa said.
As she put it, “We had another conversation about not trusting things from the internet or Alexa.”
Within the next two days, a representative from Amazon made a statement assuring customers that Alexa would no longer make suggestions like this.
As this spokesperson told People , “As soon as we became aware of this error, we quickly fixed it, and are taking steps to help prevent something similar from happening again.”
As for how this happened in the first place, it seems that Alexa took exactly the wrong message away from an article by Our Community Now that warned people about the dangers of the pre-existing “outlet challenge.”
Although you’re not likely to find evidence of it there anymore, the challenge that Alexa described once circulated TikTok in early 2020.
And while the Our Community Now article described how the challenge was done, it immediately followed that explanation up with, “The resulting sparks are supposed to be cool enough to win you instant internet fame. (Obviously, do NOT attempt this!)”
However, Alexa only zeroed in on the keyword “challenge,” which led it to simply repeat the instructions verbatim with no further context and set an arbitrary time limit to complete it.
Maybe now, that ill-advised trend can stay dead.
h/t: People
Last Updated on December 29, 2021 by Mason Joseph Zimmer
