Americans have grown to trust technology such as clocks, search results, and mapping services available on the iPhone or Android.
Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence (AI) running most of the applications is still developing, and at times can actually lead to physical and psychological harm as a result.
“Amazon issued an apology this week after one of their voice assistant devices equipped with Alexa challenged a 10-year-old girl to a potentially fatal TikTok trend– to put a penny on an exposed plug prong that was half inserted into an electric outlet.
Thankfully, the young girl — whose identity has not been revealed — was being supervised by her mother Kristin Livdahl on Sunday when she asked Amazon Alexa for a challenge”. BizPac
According to TheDailyMail, ‘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.’
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) December 26, 2021
“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,” Livdahl told the BBC.
Amazon’s Twitter account responded to the mother’s tweet on Monday.
“Hi there. We’re sorry to hear this! Please reach out to us directly via the following link so that we can look into this further with you: https://amzn.to/3sGEtkT. We hope this helps. -Daragh,” a company representative wrote.
‘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.
Written By: Eric Thompson, host of the Eric Thompson Show.
Follow Eric on his website ETTALKSHOW, and social media platforms, MAGABOOK, Twellit & Twitter.
This story syndicated with permission from Eric Thompson – Trending Politics
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