Alexa AI Attempts to murder a child
Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesizer named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio, and Amazon Tap speakers developed by Amazon Lab126. Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on hundreds of millions of devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers.
Twitter user “Kristin Livdahl” tweeted about the scenario was quite opposite last week when the artificial influence Alexa device committed a murder attempt by telling a 10-year-old girl to touch a live electrical plug with a penny. on Dec. 26, “OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said.”
The Echo smart speaker Alexa responded to the 10-year-old child with a “challenge to do” that said, “plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.“
Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that an error within Alexa has been fixed.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened, a few years back it has suggested a user to kill his foster parents. the customer was shocked when Alexa. blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”
Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events as reported by Reuters.
The dangerous activity, known as “the penny challenge,” began on TikTok and other social media platforms about a year ago. The outcome of the challenge could be potentially life-threatening.
One person said “Clearly AMZN’s algorithm realized that by suggesting this challenge customers will later have to buy a lot of stuff to replace everything after the house burned down,”
AMZN trying to underplay such things and getting involved in numerous dubious activities isn’t new.
Earlier, US Senator Elizabeth Warren called for breaking up Amazon Inc and Indian retailers demanded a government probe of the company after a Reuters investigation showed the e-commerce giant had copied products and rigged search results in India.
Meanwhile, a few days back the Indian Police have charged Amazon executive directors for running an online marijuana smuggling racket. The investigation found that around a tonne of ganja worth over Rs. 1.10 crores was in distribution via the online shopping platform Amazon over the past four months.
Luckily the child didn’t complete the challenge as Livdahl intervened. What if this was the first AI murder attempt? It sounds like something out of the dystopic television series “Black Mirror.”
