Avoiding a scandal, Alexa tells a child to do a potential deadly TikTok challenge

In a surprise move, Amazon’s Alexa told a child to touch a penny to the exposed prongs of a phone charger plugged into the wall, according to one parent who posted screenshots of their Alexa activity history. 

The device that works on AI brought the idea for the challenge from an article describing it as dangerous, citing news reports about an alleged challenge trending on TikTok. 

According to Kristin Livdahl’s screenshot, the Echo responded to “tell me a challenge to do” with “Here’s something I found on the web. According to ourcommunitynow.com: The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.” 

In the post on Sunday, user Kristin Livdahl explained how her 10-year-old daughter had asked the AI helper for a “challenge” to do.

Getting into more details, the kid was doing some indoor physical challenges recommended by a YouTube physical education teacher and “wanted another one.” Then, That’s when Alexa made a surprise comment: “Here’s something I found on the web,” it suggested, “According to ourcommunitynow.com: The challenge is simple: Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”

On its part, Amazon confirmed Alexa’s behavior, saying, “As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.” Later, Livdahl confirmed that since yesterday, the option of asking for a challenge was no longer working.

It is worth mentioning that Amazon is one of many companies to run into issues trying to break down the web for content. For example, a user in October reported that Google displayed potentially dangerous advice in one of its featured snippets if the user Googled “had a seizure now what” — the info it showed was from the section of a webpage describing what not to do when someone was having a seizure.

Last but not least, users reported other related problems, including a user who said Google gave results for orthostatic hypotension when searching for orthostatic hypertension, and a different user saying that Google displayed terrible advice for consoling someone who’s grieving.