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December 29, 2021 – 10:28 am Clock
Massachusetts: 10-year-old wanted to do sports, Alexa suggests Penny Challenge
“Alexa, that wasn’t the kind of ‘challenge’ we meant”. Because Kristin’s daughter actually only wanted to do some sport under supervision, instead the Amazon Alexa is said to have proposed a life-threatening challenge to the 10-year-old. Kristin Livdahl was horrified and now made the case public.
Amazon explains: Alexa has been updated
Kristin Livdahl shared a screenshot of the risky recommendation on Twitter last Sunday. The digital assistant is said to have suggested the following to her daughter: “Plug a cell phone’s power pack into the socket and then insert a coin into the open USB slot”.
This so-called “Penny Challenge” has been circulating at TikTok for about a year and can be life-threatening as electricity naturally flows through this point. Inserting the coin can generate sparks and, in the worst case, even cause a fire. The fire brigade in Yorkshire (USA) had warned urgently against this challenge: one could “lose fingers, hands and arms”, as reported by “The Press”.
More than 15,000 people have responded to Kristin Livdahl’s tweet so far. And Amazon has already said: “When we found out about this error, we acted immediately to correct the error,” Alexa had been updated to prevent the voice assistant from recommending such dangerous things again in the future. (mca)