Often, we will hear the stupid internet challenges and sometimes dangerous caught with teenagers in the world. As if eating pairs of pairs or swallowing cinnamon spoons is not enough, there seems to be a new challenging round and stupid to touch a penny to a partially exposed phone charger branch. One parent learned about this challenge in a rather worrying way, because Alexa advised him as a challenge for his 10-year-old daughter.
During the weekend of a vacation, Kristin Livdahlihan to Twitter to share troubling stories. “My 10-year-old OMFG just asked Alexa at our echo for a challenge and this was what he said,” Livdahl said on his initial tweet. Which accompanying tweets is a picture of Alexa Livdahl activity which shows the user’s request – “Tell me the challenge to do” – followed by the Alexa reply.
“This is something I found on the web. According to KamicommunityNow.com: The challenge is simple: Install the phone charger about halfway to an outlet, then touch a penny to the open branch.” That might not be what most of us will expect Alexa again when asked to be asked challenge.
Only so we are really clear: don’t try this challenge at home because you are guaranteed by the best evil surprises and the possibility of experiencing a much worse. As a bonus, you might even start an electric fire, which has never had good news. Electric high voltage and human body don’t get along well, but hopefully, it’s without saying for almost all of us.
However, Livdahl continued by saying on his twitter thread that his 10-year-old daughter was not, in fact, trying Alexa’s advice. Not only Livdahl to him not as soon as Alexa read the task, but his daughter told him that he would not try it in the first place. Requested background by another Twitter user, Livdahl said that he and his daughter looked after themselves to be occupied by more innocent challenges (and much more dangerous) because of the bad weather outside.
“We do some physical challenges, such as lying down and rolling on holding shoes on your feet, from a Phy Ed teacher on YouTube before,” Livdahl said. “Bad weather outside. He just wants another.”
So, how do we arrive at the point Alexa challenging a 10-year-old child to shock themselves? In fact, this is not spooky as it seems. When requested IDE, Alexa crawls the web for certain keywords and lands on the website you see in the answer. Alexa found this article from our community now, which was published again in January 2020.
For the record, articles in our community now do not support challenges but instead of warning parents about it. Alexa found this article on the web of the crawling for challenges and, because it was not a human who could say the difference between dangerous and harmless challenges, appeared as a recommendation.
Basically, this is the Alexa case that looks for certain keywords but loses the context behind them. However, the idea that Alexa can present dangerous challenges like this as a recommendation is enough to give parents everywhere to stop, but Amazon seems to be in this case. In a statement to the BBC, Amazon confirmed that he had fixed this problem, so Alexa should no longer recommend the electrocution to those who are looking for challenges.
“Customer trust is in the middle of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and useful information for customers,” the company said in a statement to the BBC. “As soon as we realize this error, we take quick action to fix it.”