A mom is sharing a scary story with other parents after their Alexa put her child in a dangerous situation. On December 26, Kristin Livdahl took to Twitter to explain how the situation occurred.
As Kristin explained, her 10-year-old asked Alexa for a “challenge.” And her answer was something Kristin never expected to hear.
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“Here’s something I found on the web,” Alexa told the 10-year-old. “According to ourcommunitynow.com, the challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”
Is your jaw on the floor? Because ours are!
As Kristin continued to explain, she and her child were using the Alexa to give them ideas on “physical challenges” they could complete together, “like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a Physical Education teacher on YouTube earlier.” Kristin said the weather wasn’t great outside so this was how they were keeping themselves active and entertained while cooped up inside.
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“She just wanted another [challenge],” Kristin explained. And this is just another deadly challenge to add to the list of dangerous games kids are playing on the internet.
This particular challenge, known as the penny challenge, went viral several years ago. While the list of dangers this challenge possesses is long, some of the most frightening are electric shock and house fires.
As the New York Post reports, Alexa uses Bing as its default search engine when it comes to finding answers for the questions it is asked.
“Our customers want Alexa to get smarter and more helpful to them every day,” the site notes. “To do that, we use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems using machine learning.”
And in a statement made to the Post regarding this particular snafu, a spokesperson for Amazon said, “Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.’”
Thankfully, Kristin was close by to ensure her daughter didn’t follow through with the computer’s suggestion. “I was right there and yelled, ‘No, Alexa, no!’ like it was a dog,” the mom said on Twitter. “My daughter says she is too smart to do something like that anyway.”
Yikes!
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