Alexa Caused Numerous Amazon Orders For Dollhouses Across San Diego When TV Report Mentioned Its Name

In an unforeseen incident, Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, triggered numerous orders for dollhouses across the city of San Diego. This chain of events was initiated when a local news report casually mentioned the name of the product. This underscores the importance of responsible AI governance to prevent such mishaps and ensure safe and secure interactions.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.529, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.1 — similarity 0.520, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.512, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/34

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.