Amazon says it has updated its voice assistant after it transpired that Alexa had suggested a 10-year-old girl touch a coin to the prongs of a partially inserted plug as a challenge.
The girl’s mother posted a tweet on Monday describing how her daughter had been doing some cold-weather indoor challenges set by a phys. ed. teacher on YouTube and was seeking another one. To the woman’s shock, Alexa suggested a “simple” task it had found on the web, whereby the participant “plug[s] in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch[es] a penny to the exposed prongs.”
The dangerous “penny challenge” started making the rounds on TikTok and other platforms about a year ago and can potentially lead to electric shock as well as cause a fire.
READ MORE: Elon Musk, crypto, cannibalism: French sage’s prophecies for 2022
The woman, who was in the room when Alexa dished out the challenge, immediately yelled, “No, Alexa, no!”, she wrote. Thankfully, the girl had not yet attempted the dangerous stunt, telling her mother she was “too smart to do something like that anyway.”
Commenting on the incident to BBC, Amazon said it had taken “swift action” to prevent the assistant from recommending this kind of activity again.
© 2021, paradox. All rights reserved.
Russia repelled a wave of attempted Ukrainian drones strikes on oil refineries and energy infrastructure…
Antony Blinken traveled to China this week to warn Beijing about sanctions for supplying military…
The Ukraine conflict is Washington’s doing and the US is deliberately trying to prolong the…
The US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, will allow Ukrainian forces to target…
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has revealed he once got up-close and personal with a “strategic…
The long-range ATACMS missiles that the US has supplied to Ukraine are “extremely dangerous weapons,”…