Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, would have sent a child to touch a coin to the exposed pins of a charger connected to the wall. According to the mother, who posted images of the history of artificial intelligence activities, the interaction would have arisen from a challenge of an article described as dangerous and an alleged trend from TikTok.
It all started when Kristin Livdahl’s son asked the Echo device to suggest a challenge to be met, such as those in dance that are so common on social networks. The wizard would then have located a page on the site. ourcommunitynow.com in which such a recommendation was made.
OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said. pic.twitter.com/HgGgrLbdS8
— Kristin Livdahl (@klivdahl) December 26, 2021
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Alexa also explained how the child should do such a challenge: “connect a phone charger only halfway into a socket and then touch the exposed pins with a coin”. Luckily, nothing happened and everyone is doing well, but the scare was big.
In a statement to the BBC, Amazon said it acted immediately as soon as it became aware of the error to correct it. In fact, the boy’s mother said that she tried to repeat the practice and failed, a fact proven by the Kenyannews. Now, when asked to offer a challenge, the assistant just recommends that you “get off the couch and get out”.
AIs still need improvement
Of course, this could have turned out very badly if the child had followed the AI’s advice, so the mother was quite shocked by what happened. The e-commerce giant isn’t the only company to have problems with its content delivery algorithm: Google Assistant has been through this, and Siri has also been the target of inappropriate responses.
In the case of Alexa, the algorithm selected the descriptive part of a notice and reproduced it to the user without presenting the original context. Imagine, however, if the mother was not around and the child had time to act alone? It’s one of the challenges that virtual assistant makers constantly have to deal with in order to curb dangerous practices that can lead to death.
