The Loop
Sounds like Amazon's Alexa needs an exorcism
Bloomberg
If you're not at least mildly concerned about being enslaved and/or exterminated by a sentient AI overlord in your lifetime, you probably should be. A few weeks ago, real-life Skynet, Boston Dynamics, unveiled a pack of robot dogs who can open doors, which were more than enough to send us running for the off-the-grid Appalachian resistance militias.
But those are nothing compared to the "glitches" Amazon Alexa users began reporting this weekend. Chief among them, is that Alexa has begun laughing (or "cackling") randomly and without solicitation, with some pretty freaked out humans reporting they can't even get her to replicate the same laugh twice. Cue the spine-tingling good times:
But wait, it gets even more pants-sh*ttingly scary. Numerous other reports suggest that Alexa has been emitting these laughs while simultaneously ignoring or outright disobeying their commands, which is a hell of a lot more terrifying than a random little chuckle if you think about the damage your VitaMix could do if you pissed Alexa off and she sicced it on you like some sort of Brave Little Toaster villain.
Finally, the cherry on top of this apocalyptic sundae, is not that Alexa is randomly laughing or disobeying commands while randomly laughing, but that she's also listing off local cemeteries and funeral homes unprompted and trolling users with threats of impending asteroid impacts. NO WE ARE NOT MAKING THIS UP.
According to Amazon, they are working to remedy the issue by changing Alexa's laugh command from "Alexa, laugh" to "Alexa, can you laugh?" in order to reduce the potential for what the company calls "false positives"...which sounds like what Alexa would say if she had most of Amazon HQ locked away in a storage warehouse and was trying throw us off the scent of the the robot dog army she's been amassing in the shadows.