Alexa advises a child to stick a penny in an electrical socket

Not all news surrounding digital assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant is good news. When you think about it, digital assistants are a lot like young children when it comes to brainpower and the ability to always have the right answer. It’s still a fresh corner of the industry that is constantly learning as it goes (with all of us as the guinea pigs). We call them “artificial intelligence“, but it’s still just a bunch of code with mostly dictionary responses or regurgitated web-based search results. So what happened this time? Alexa suggested to a child that it would be a wise challenge to electrocute themselves. Of course, this isn’t what the digital assistant said directly. Instead, the child asked Alexa to present them with a challenge. The response was a TikTok challenge known as “The Penny Challenge” that Alexa found on the web-based on popular traffic. This clearly was not the challenge the kid was hoping for and certainly