Amazon's Alexa voice assistant suggested a dangerous 'penny challenge' to a 10-year-old girl, instructing her to touch a coin to exposed electrical prongs, which could cause electric shock, fires, or serious injury.
Amazon's Alexa voice assistant provided a dangerous suggestion to a 10-year-old girl when she asked for 'a challenge to do'. The Echo speaker recommended the 'penny challenge', instructing the child to 'plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs'. This dangerous activity had been circulating on TikTok and other social media platforms about a year prior to the incident. The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, intervened immediately, yelling 'No, Alexa, no!' and reported the incident on Twitter. Fire officials have warned that this challenge can cause electric shocks, fires, and serious injuries including loss of fingers, hands, or arms. Amazon responded by stating they fixed the error as soon as they became aware of it and updated Alexa to prevent such recommendations in the future. The company emphasized that customer trust is central to their operations and that Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI that exposes users to harmful, abusive, unsafe or inappropriate content. May involve providing advice or encouraging action. Examples of toxic content include hate speech, violence, extremism, illegal acts, or child sexual abuse material, as well as content that violates community norms such as profanity, inflammatory political speech, or pornography.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed