Amazon’s Alexa will provide users with challenges to complete when asked, but a mother was shocked when the digital assistant suggested her 10-year-old daughter try a potentially deadly TikTok challenge.
Kristin Livdahl tweeted about the incident on Sunday, stating that Alexa told her child to ‘plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.’
This ‘outlet challenge’ was a TikTok trend in the US last year.
An Amazon spokesperson told DailyMail.com in an email: ‘The tweet is not fake however the challenge is no longer live. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we took swift action to fix it.’
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Kristin Livdahl tweeted about the incident on Sunday, stating that Alexa told her child to ‘plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs’
Livdahl said her and her daughter were doing physical challenges said by Alexa, which included laying down and rolling over, to ease the frustration of bad weather that last Sunday and that is when she heard the dangerous suggestion.
According to Amazon, Alexa uses Bing as the default search engine for all her queries and the company asks users to help improve answers.
‘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.’
Because Amazon uses Bing, the ‘outlet challenge’ likely came up and that is why Alexa repeated it to the mom and her 10-year-old daughter.
This ‘outlet challenge’ was a TikTok trend in the US last year. Pictured is a still from a TikTok video showing someone perform the challenge
The outlet can catch fire during the challenge. Pictured is a still from a TikTok video showing someone perform the challenge
Some in the comments of Livdahl’s tweet joked that they thought Alexa was up to no good, and potentially ‘evil’.
‘I suspected Alexa was evil. Just didn’t suspect Alexa was this evil,’ someone wrote.
‘Houston, we’ve got a very serious problem!’ another added.
A third wrote: ‘The machine uprising has begun.’
The outlet challenge surfaced in 2020, sparking firefighters across the US to warn parents about the dangerous TikTok video.
Some in the comments of Livdahl’s tweet joked that they thought Alexa was up to no good, and potentially ‘evil’. ‘I suspected Alexa was evil. Just didn’t suspect Alexa was this evil,’ someone wrote.
Massachusetts firefighters, specifically, issued an alert across the state in January 2020, after two students at Plymouth North High School in Plymouth were caught attempting to stick a penny into a phone charger, which resulted in two scorched electrical outlets
Massachusetts firefighters, specifically, issued an alert across the state in January 2020, after two students at Plymouth North High School in Plymouth were caught attempting to stick a penny into a phone charger, which resulted in two scorched electrical outlets.
Plymouth Fire Chief Ed Bradley, said in a statement: ‘Social media elevates it.
‘They see it online, they see someone do it, they start laughing, they run away and no one gets hurt and they assume the same will happen when they do it, so they think it’s funny to do it in a classroom.’
