Alexa frightens with spontaneous remark: ‘All I see is people dying’

OPINION:

An Amazon virtual digital assistant owner in San Francisco was just creeped out when his Alexa announced, out of the blue, “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.”

Say what?

The spooked Shwan Kinnear said his device made the remark and then fell into a long silence. When prompted to repeat, the gadget feigned ignorance, India Today reported.

But talk about unnerving. At least the kid who saw dead people in the tingling 1999 blockbuster “The Sixth Sense” was, well, human — human and bestowed with special abilities that, in the end, made movie sense. Alexa’s a hunk of metal and wire, and by all accounts, no way, no how endowed with special abilities to see dead people.

Imagine walking from kitchen to living room and hearing a computerized voice talk about seeing the dead. And nobody’s home, and the television isn’t even turned on.

But this isn’t the first quote-unquote glitch with Alexa.

In March, Circa News reported in a video that ran on YouTube that Alexa was “freaking people out in a very creepy way.” How so? By bursting into laughter, without prompt.

As one user noted in the video: “Lying in bed about to fall asleep when Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh. … There’s a good chance I get murdered tonight.”

Amazon explained it away with this somewhat blase statement: “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

Apparently, the fix takes time. In August, Beyond Science reported the glitch was still occurring.

“The sound has been described as anything from a child’s laugh to the kind of canned laughter you get in sitcoms,” the news site wrote.

If that were all, maybe users could forgive. After all, it’s not like the laughter was spontaneously bursting from a china doll with unblinking glass blue eyes, right?

But then there’s this, as noted by MIT’s Technology Review, just this May: “Yes, Alexa is recording mundane details of your life, and it’s creepy as hell.” The story highlighted a well-reported happening of a Portland, Oregon, couple who experienced the device’s recording of their private, in-home conversations and subsequent distribution of that recording to an outside contact. Completely without prompt, completely absent the couple’s knowledge.

Nothing to see here, move on?

Hmm. To recap: Alexa says it sees dead people, bursts into spontaneous, unprompted laughter and records private conversations between spouses that are then emailed along to outside contacts?

Oh boy. If this is the future, Houston, we may have a problem.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.