Alexa Advises 10-Year-Old To Touch Live Plug With Penny

Amazon’s Alexa mishaps strike again, and this time, it’s telling a 10-year-old to try touching the prongs of a live outlet with a penny. The mother, Kristin Livdahl, shared the shocking story on Twitter with a screenshot of the challenge the device had proposed.

She has an Amazon Echo and has been playing with her daughter by asking for challenges from the device at their home in Oakdale, Minnesota. And on their next one, the girl asked the AI to get the next challenge. It was one that was too shocking to not share.

“Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” said Alexa.

She later shared that they’ve just been getting physical challenges. She assured others that she was right there while the Echo was sending the obnoxious challenge.

The “penny challenge” was something that had gone viral around social media, particularly TikTok which is home to many young adolescents, teenagers, and even children. While the result is obvious, many still succumbed to becoming victims to it, sustaining burn injuries and damaging their sockets.

While it ended in a lighthearted way for the family, whose daughter was “too smart to do something like that,” the concerns are there.

Amazon has finally addressed the issue and told BBC, “As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it. [We] will continue to advance our systems to prevent similar responses in the future.”

Concern for parents on how Alexa performs and may provide dangerous information to oblivious individuals continue.

Speaking to HuffPost, Kristin was surprised by what Alexa did but quickly regained her composure, “It was a good opportunity to talk to my kids about internet safety and not believing everything you see or hear from the internet again.”

She also added, “It was a good moment to go through internet safety and not trusting things you read without research and verification again. We thought the cesspool of YouTube was what we needed to worry about at this age—with limited internet and social media access—but not the only thing.”

The incident has since been unable to be recreated by several users.

The challenge quoted was from OurCommunityNow where it addresses the danger of the challenge. Yet, Alexa has randomly grabbed a challenge from the public and removed important details when presented to the girl.

And in the case that you really need to see what happens, here it is.

Nobody was hurt so a lot of people were making jokes about Alexa’s failures.