Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live electrical socket with penny
A child requesting a challenge from an Amazon Alexa device was told to "plug in a phone charger about halfway, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs."
Alexa is a smart assistant on the Amazon Echo
The dangerous search result appeared thanks to something called "the penny challenge" going viral on TikTok sometime in the year prior. Alexa will answer general inquiries with a web search, but there is no guarantee where that result will come from.
"We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a teacher on YouTube earlier," said the child's mother on Twitter. "Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."
According to a reportfrom the BBC, the mother was present and was able to tell Alexa to stop when she heard what it was saying. However, she did assert that her daughter was smart enough to know better than perform such a dangerous task.
"Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," said Amazon in a statement. "As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."
Smart assistants like Google and Alexa are well known for having various skills that access information on the mostly unfiltered web. While there seems to be some form of trusted sources for these devices, it is apparent that some bad actors still get through.
Read on AppleInsider
Alexa is a smart assistant on the Amazon Echo
The dangerous search result appeared thanks to something called "the penny challenge" going viral on TikTok sometime in the year prior. Alexa will answer general inquiries with a web search, but there is no guarantee where that result will come from.
"We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a teacher on YouTube earlier," said the child's mother on Twitter. "Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."
According to a reportfrom the BBC, the mother was present and was able to tell Alexa to stop when she heard what it was saying. However, she did assert that her daughter was smart enough to know better than perform such a dangerous task.
OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said. pic.twitter.com/HgGgrLbdS8
-- Kristin Livdahl (@klivdahl)
"Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," said Amazon in a statement. "As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."
Smart assistants like Google and Alexa are well known for having various skills that access information on the mostly unfiltered web. While there seems to be some form of trusted sources for these devices, it is apparent that some bad actors still get through.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
That's because since the mid eighties, UK plugs live prongs were required to be insulated half way from the plug to the tip. When the tip of the prongs make contact with the live contacts in the socket, only the insulated part of the prong is exposed outside of the socket. Unless the insulation on the prong is compromised, there's no way that any foreign object can come in contact with the bare metal of a live prong. Very clever design.
Even more clever is the design of the socket. The socket has a "shutter" that prevents anyone from sticking a paper clip or small screwdriver into one of the hole for the live prong and touch the live contacts. This "shutter" opens to allow the plug prongs to make contact with the live contacts when the ground prong is inserted part way into the socket.
I knew this about 15 years ago when my sister in-law was married to an Englishman that travel back home frequently and I inquired why the UK plug in his electrical adapter travel kit was so big, compared to that of the US plug.
Plus there's a fuse built into the UK plug.
Siri does the same thing. When Siri has no idea what you are asking, Siri will query the internet. And Siri queries the internet for 90% of the things you ask it. There is no skill, and this has nothing to do with Alexa. Any AI would pull the same query from the internet, including a google search.
It's your run-of-the-mill utter stupidity challenge, like the laundry detergent pod swallowing challenge a few years ago. It's goes to show that social media, Youtube, and search engines only have post hoc ethics or safety nets built into them. Ie, they are only filtered or actionable when they have lost in court or perceived to have gov't action from some stupid content they host and amplify. They are pure popularity-amplification algorithms, with zero understanding of content. It's just counting page hits based on keyword and trying to get that page more hits by broadcasting that page to as many people they think will click on it as possible. And they definitely know what contents get a lot of hit, know how to design an algorithm to assign the right keyword meta data to pages, so on and so forth.
So, Amazon's search engine got a search engine hit on something that involved a challenge that had a lot of views, never mind that it was something so utterly stupid, so unethical for the company to do, and so super-litigable. The page or content did not include enough safety or social safety keywords from the start to filter it out. They will always amplify first, and wait until someone makes it a problem before stopping the amplification.
Really, I think the only realistic course of action for social media amplification is for people to sue them for everything. Everything has to be challenged and continuously.
UK plugs may be massive by comparison, but they are massively safer by design. Genius design.
It's not as simple as that. The web page has plenty of warnings, but how the content was composed within the HTML markup, Alexa grabbed a "summary" of the page and extracted that as the main page content. Scraping web pages this way is exactly how search engines like Google work, too. They grab a summary snippet, and it just so happened that this challenge's text was written into the page in such a way that it became the summary.
Amazon probably "fixed" this issue by blacklisting that particular extraction, rather than changing how Alexa works, although it's also possible that blacklisting is a corrective teaching moment for Alexa. Alexa would need to re-analyze the entire web page to learn "why" this was an incorrect response. Context is important.