Amazon in trouble: "Alexa encouraged my daughter to perform a deadly ticking challenge"
A worried mother said that Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, offered her daughter to try out the dangerous ticking challenge in which a coin is placed in the exposed part of a phone charger connected to an outlet.
Amazon apologized and promised to correct the mistake, but the network of users refused to forgive: "Here's another reason not to keep Alexa at home"
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29/12/2021
Wednesday, 29 December 2021, 11:11
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Do not dare to try - this is what it looked like when people did the dangerous TIKTOK challenge
Oh no! Does the vision of artificial intelligence taking over the human race show its first signs? A troubled mother tweeted that Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, encouraged her 10-year-old daughter to try a deadly viral challenge involving dangerous use of electricity. She attached a screenshot of the dangerous recommendation, garnered over 10,000 likes and angered users.
In a tweet published on Sunday, the mother, Kristin Liebdahl, said that her daughter performed a number of physical challenges at home, about which she received a recommendation from a physical education teacher on YouTube - and "wanted another challenge." She asked Alexa to challenge her and she dropped an unexpected bomb: "Here's something I found online. According to ourcommunitynow.com, the challenge is simple: plug a phone charger into an outlet about halfway, and place a coin in your bare teeth."
This is actually an old ticking challenge, the "coin challenge", designed to create sparks and on the way may damage the electrical outlet and even ignite fires.
In one incident from 2020, a high school student in Massachusetts lit a fire after performing the challenge, prompting fire crews to issue a statement warning parents of the dangers of the challenge.
Ironically, the article from which Alexa pulled the challenge is actually the same one in which the warning to parents about this challenge appeared.
This is not the first time
"Murder the adoptive parents": When Amazon's voice assistant went crazy
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This was Alexa's recommendation: (Photo: screenshot, twitter)
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And here she explains what led to this:
According to Amazon, Alexa uses Bing as the default search engine for all of its queries - and the company has previously asked users to help improve the system's response. "Our customers strive for Alexa to be smarter and more helpful in everyday matters," the company notes, "to do this, we use your requests for Alexa to train our speech recognition and comprehension systems through machine learning."
Amazon apologized for the incident on Twitter: "Hello. We are sorry to hear about it! Please contact us directly via the following link so we can examine this with you in depth. We hope it helps", they wrote in response and an Amazon spokesman responded to The Post: "Trust "Customers are at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant and helpful information to customers. Once we learned of this error, we took prompt action to correct it."
Indeed, Lebedhel tweeted yesterday that the "challenge request" option from Alexa is no longer working.
In the test we performed with Alexa we were unable to achieve a similar result today, and even a request for a challenge from the network did not lead to a result or continued from a very limited pool.
Another case
The boy asked to play - the digital assistant started reading categories of porn.
Watch
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Amazon Response:
Many on the net expressed their anger. "Here's another reason not to keep Alexa at home," one reporter and another added: "There is no reason to keep Alexa at home. If it was not clear to you to this day - here is proof." Another added: "Why, for God's sake, would an organization that needs to know better like Amazon sell a product that randomly selects content from the mess that is on the web to interact with any random person at any level of critical thinking ability?".
Amazon is not the only company that has run into problems trying to analyze content online. In October, a user reported that Google presented in the search results tips that could be dangerous to the question: "I had a seizure. Now what?". The information Google presented was from an article describing what not to do when someone gets a seizure. At the time, The Verge confirmed the same user's report, but the error appears to have been corrected based on a test we did today. Tiktok was also accused of distributing problematic content due to algorithms, when in 2020 a Nazi song went viral on the app and garnered more than 6.5 million views in multiple videos before being removed from there.
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Viral challenge
Ticket
Amazon
Alexa