Alexa Tells 10-Year-Old Girl To Touch Electrical Plug With A Coin

Amazon apologised and updated its Alexa voice assistant after an incident where a 10-year-old girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”; the challenge itself consisted of touching a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug. This dangerous activity can cause electric shocks, fires, and other damages, so the mother of the girl was very shocked to hear the suggested challenge by an AI product from Amazon. She tweeted about the incident, gathering a lot of attention from other people who also found this very shocking.

The mother of the girl who tweeted about this incident is called Kristin Livdahl, who said it happened when the family asked the Echo smart speaker for physical challenges to spend time doing due to the bad weather outside. Kristin Livdahl 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 said upon being asked, “The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”

The mother intervened saying, “No, Alexa, no!” and fortunately, the 10-year-old daughter “was too smart to do something like that.”

The ‘penny challenge’ went viral on social media platforms, such as TikTok, in 2020. During this time, Michael Clusker, a station manager at Carlisle East fire station, said to The Press newspaper in Yorkshire, “I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms. The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt.” Fire officials in the US also spoke out against the challenge, speaking of its dangerous consequences.

After the incident with the 10-year-old girl, Amazon said they fixed the error as soon as they became aware of it; they updated Alexa to prevent the assistant in recommending dangerous activities such as this ‘penny challenge’ in the future. A recently released statement by Amazon said, “Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.”

This incident should be a warning to parents and everyone that we should be careful when letting innocent people use AI products, as something unfortunate could have happened if the girl who asked for a challenge did not think beforehand whether this was dangerous or not. We are glad to know that she is safe, and hope that everyone else refrains from the ‘penny challenge’ as it can cause a lot of harm.