Don’t worry, the kid’s okay
Digital assistants are an inescapable part of the modern world. They come installed on our smartphones, our computers, and our smart speakers, and in theory they’re supposed to make our lives easier and help us accomplish more. What they’re not supposed to do is help us burn down our houses, but try telling that to Amazon’s Alexa.
Two days ago on Twitter, Kristin Livdahl shared a very unusual and dangerous “challenge” given to her 10-year-old daughter. Livdahl and her daughter had been going on YouTube to look for some fun ideas to keep active while stuck indoors due to bad weather. When her daughter asked for another challenge, Alexa overheard and responded by encouraging her to “plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”
The wording of the challenge comes from a 2020 article on OurCommunityNow.com about the “outlet challenge” which was trending on TikTok. #OutletChallenge was also trending on Twitter at the time due to numerous fire departments tweeting out warnings about the dangers to their communities.
Thankfully for Livdahl and her daughter, no one was hurt. “I was right there when it happened,” she explained, “and we had another good conversation about not trusting anything from the internet or Alexa. No attempt was made to try this.”
Stupid and dangerous challenges are nothing new to the internet. The fire challenge, popular around the same time, involves pouring flammable liquid on yourself and igniting it. The bathroom challenge from earlier this year had participants stealing or destroying public bathroom fixtures. And the mother of them all, the Tide-pod challenge, encouraged people to eat laundry detergent.
An Amazon spokesperson issued a statement to Indy100, saying “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.” Let’s just hope that Alexa will be a little more discerning about what content to scrape in the future.
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