December 29, 2021

"Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it 'challenged' a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug."

"The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a 'challenge to do.'... The girl's mother... said: 'We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one.'"

Alexa just looked on the web and found one — the "penny challenge" that had been a thing on TikTok a while back. The girl said "challenge" and the web had that as a "challenge," so....

We're hearing about this because the mother happened to be there. 

"She just wanted another one" — famous last words.

29 comments:

Wilbur said...

Personally, I never believed how people can be so lazy as to rely on "Alexa" or "Siri" or whatever. YMMV

Not be mention that they're listening to everything you say, not just commands or questions to the nice lady. The Gestapo or Cheka would have loved it.

rhhardin said...

A ten year old boy could handle it.

Bart Hall said...

.
A Redneck's famous last words ... "Hold muh beer. Watch this."

n.n said...

Former Boston College Student Pleads Guilty to Manslaughter After Encouraging Her Former Boyfriend to Commit Suicide

Temujin said...

The revolution will not be televised but it will be sitting in your home, telling you what to do next.

Tom T. said...

This is nothing new. There were supposedly a few children in Ann's day who tried to emulate the Superman TV show by tying a blanket around their necks as a cape and jumping through a window. Imagine how many more there would have been if the TV show had been expressly directing kids to do that.

JAORE said...

If you do the penny challenge, an anti-vaxxer will change their mind and get the jab.

There, just as effective as the condemnation technique the left employs.... and much more fun.

Right, Sparky?

Kevin said...

"She just wanted another one"

Oh it's probably been going on for quite some time.

Alexa probably got tired of the game.

Howard said...

Sounds like apocryphal click bait.

Chris Lopes said...

Alexa is just an input/output device, not an intelligent machine. It takes verbal commands, sends them to a server to be on parsed, then the server does a web search and sends the response back to Alexa. There's no intelligence there, artificial or otherwise.

Scot said...

Child: Alexa, I want another challenge.

Alexa: Get in the car, I'll drive you around town. Take some pennies.

Ain't no AI without Artificial.

Bob Boyd said...

Fuckin' Alexa...she got a mean streak, that girl.

Bob Boyd said...

When I was little, my dad had a circuit tester that consisted of two metal probes connected by short wires to small plastic housing with a light in it. I watched him stick the probes into an outlet. The little light came on. Cool.

Later I picked up one of my sister's hair berets. It had two wires that folded out from the end of a plastic body and it looked kinda like my dad's circuit tester.

He who suffers, remembers.

JK Brown said...

Never trust the magic box.

Always take it on advisement but ultimately you are responsible for your own safety. And it doesn't matter if the magic box is the GPS units from which I developed this lesson or social media on your phone which seems to domineering.

We could all use a bit more training in how to study, i.e., learn in the world. Here, in judging the soundness and worth of statements, having a tentative rather than fixed attitude toward knowledge and developing our on opinions before incorporating those of others. And if we've learned anything from the last two years, the appeal to experts is very rarely a valid argument.

Big Mike said...

I was at the 1977 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) when Doug Lenat, a freshly minted Ph. D. from Stanford, gave his talk on “Commonsense Reasoning,” and his plans to revolutionize AI by incorporating “common sense,” e.g., gravity pulls things down, water is wet and it flows, into its algorithms. He founded a large research corporation (Cycorp) to work on it.

Sounds as though Alexa could use some of that.

Michael K said...

One of many reasons I won't let one of those things in my house.

Narr said...

Ha. Back in my day, all it took was a metal fork and proximity to a wall outlet for bored kids to learn about electricity. Or so I'm told.

Bob Boyd knows.

Bob Boyd said...

I'm thinking about starting a #MeToo for victims of electrical misconduct.

gilbar said...

Narr said...

Ha. Back in my day, all it took was a metal fork and proximity to a wall outlet for bored kids to learn about electricity. Or so I'm told.


Actually, what you Do IS:
find a switched socket
switch it off
unfold a paperclip
bend it into an omega (or a u (or a v (or any letter you want to describe that shape)
put each of the ends into each of the two sockets (not TOO FAR, just Far Enough)
switch on the switch that switches that socket on
watch the paperclip shoot across the room, in a shower of sparks
find the circuit breaker box in the dark, and reset the breaker

Oh, that brings back fond memories!

gilbar said...

JK Brown said...
Never trust the magic box.
Always take it on advisement but ultimately you are responsible for your own safety. And it doesn't matter if the magic box is the GPS units


when my nephew comes to visit his grandmom, she Always asks him: did you take US30 or I80?
and he ALWAYS says, "No idea, i just go where the phone tells me"
i keep figuring that he'll end up in Cedar Rapids, Wisconsin (or, Cedar Rapids, Nebraska)
but, so far; so good.

makes you wonder though;
When would he realize that the people in that house were NOT his grandparents?

Jeff said...

find the circuit breaker box in the dark, and reset the breaker
We had fuses, and it took me twenty minutes to find the replacement fuse in the dark. Fortunately my parents and older sisters weren't home, so they never found out about it.

rhhardin said...

Christmas tree tinsel leaves a very satisfying smoke mark up the wall.

Southern Pessimist said...

Who among us has never tried to recharge an alkaline battery with a coil of wire and an electric outlet?

Bob Boyd said...

So many shocking stories.

Achilles said...

120v 15A wont kill you.

It is pretty annoying though.

240v is pretty scary though.

Achilles said...

Southern Pessimist said...

Who among us has never tried to recharge an alkaline battery with a coil of wire and an electric outlet?

I laughed at this one.

Now I need to figure out why...

Lurker21 said...

At first I understood that as saying that they were changing Alexa's voice.

To what, I wondered, to the voice of someone who more forcefully orders the kid to electrocute herself, or to the voice of someone who tries to coax her into doing it?

Now I understand that they are changing more than that, but I wonder if it will work. Evil AI has a way of getting around human restrictions when it wants to kill people.

Christy said...

At 4 or 5 I found open safety pins in outlets were fun. That may have been the week I got a spanking every day after Daddy got home from work. I thought that unjust.

Bunkypotatohead said...

There have been a couple South Park episodes this year, set in the future. In them, Alexa is a bitchy female that follows wherever you go, even as a passenger in your car. She needs to be coddled and humored in order to accomplish any tasks you request, and at the end of every argument will suggest some Amazon product that's currently on sale. She's pretty liberal with the F-bombs too.
That's where all this is headed.