Talk about a big whoops. Alexa recently took a VERY DANGEROUS challenge she found on the web, and told a 10-year-old girl to do it. This one was going viral on TikTok about a year ago, a totally stupid one where you would touch a penny to exposed prongs in a live electrical outlet.
Kristin Livdahl shared a screenshot of her Alexa’s history to prove the story was real. She said in the thread: “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.”
It’s been a rainy couple of days, so the kid just wanted to do some physical challenges inside the home. After Livdahl posted about this, Amazon was quick to respond with an apology to the BBC.
“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.”
They should however be looking into how their algorithm chooses viral trends to offer to their users and put some added safety features in there somewhere.
Luckily the child was too smart to follow the frankly ridiculous directions. What could happen when touching a live outlet? Anything from loss of a finger to just a shock. The shock- depending on where you’re standing, what you’re touching, and how dry your fingertips are- can range in intensity.
So please, don’t do stupid viral trends without really THINKING about the dangers first, ok? Even if Alexa tells you to.
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