Current Events > so turns out Alexa is a bitch...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do".

"Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said.
Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.

She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."

That's when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had "found on the web".

The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.

Many metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.

"I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms," Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020.

"The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt."

Fire officials in the US have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.

Ms Livdahl tweeted that she intervened, yelling: "No, Alexa, no!"

However, she said her daughter was "too smart to do something like that".

Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the assistant recommending such activity in the future.

"Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," said Amazon in a statement.

"As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59810383

seriously, wtf??

People are just noticing this now?

That's when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had "found on the web".

The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.

Many metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.

Because "Stick A Fork in the Outlet" challenge was a little on-the-nose...

It still floors me that people willingly put these in their homes.

How the heck did this happen

Hey you try having a bunch of idiot asking you questions and crap all the time, and not want to tell them to off themselves eventually.

Is this satire or was Alexa reading a challenge from Google?

AldousIsDead posted...

It still floors me that people willingly put these in their homes.

I ended up getting three of them for free and just use them as clocks and speakers. It's uhhhhh it's okay I guess.

Alexa uses the web a lot and doesn't seem to check the accuracy that well. Google is a bit better in that they have tons of fact checked results and it only goes to the web if absolutely necessary.

Both need to do better on their results.

Mistere Man posted...

Hey you try having a bunch of idiot asking you questions and crap all the time, and not want to tell them to off themselves eventually.

Didn't people learn anything from "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

I do find it funny that most sci-fi treats computers with advanced AI as cool, when in reality they just want to kill us

Forget Alexa, this is one more reason why tik tok should be banned lol

Blue_Thunder posted...

Forget Alexa, this is one more reason why tok should be banned lol

also true

Just warned my GF about this so her kids (who are obsessed with Alexa) dont try it.

Is all of TikTok just people lip syncing and trying to kill themselves?

__aCEr__ posted...

Is all of TikTok just people lip syncing and trying to kill themselves?

That's just the most vocal (lol) parts. Some of it is useful, but it's mostly a platform for stoopid people.

This is how the robot uprising starts. Not with guns and bombs. But with manipulating dumb people. Honestly sounds like a SMBC comic.

is this like how 4chan turned that one chat bot into a white supremacist

tiktok lol

FortuneCookie posted...

Is this satire or was Alexa reading a challenge from Google?

All of these digital assistants are trained up on an immense amount of data in order to be able to understand what's being asked of them and respond in a way that isn't just one of a handful of stock responses. These companies are probably relying on automated data scraping from social media to help generate the day they need to train their machine learning models.

It's the same thing with chatbots. They always go bad because the only reliable way to get enough data to make them smarter is to expose them to social media.

Not just a bitch, but a dirty bitch
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wCMrD712AkQ

pegusus123456 posted...

Not just a bitch, but a dirty bitch
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wCMrD712AkQ

That ending Lol!

Seems like Alexa is programmed to find these challenges on social media, and it got this one from Tik Tok. New challenge guys: electrocute yourself! Just do it it will be cool! Of course this is from Tik Tok.

Yeah you cannot convince me China isn't doing this shit on purpose. Still don't understand why Tik Tok (or any Chinese software/hardware) is legal in the US, especially considering no American programs are legal in China at all. Unless you count the knockoffs they copy/pasted, renamed, and installed a bunch of government censorship into, of course.

CapnMuffin posted...

This is how the robot uprising starts. Not with guns and bombs. But with manipulating dumb people. Honestly sounds like a SMBC comic.

Wouldn't they want to keep the dumb people around, as they're easier to manipulate into pressing the button that begins the robot uprising?

pegusus123456 posted...

Not just a bitch, but a dirty bitch
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wCMrD712AkQ

lmfao