Unintended Purchase Incident: News Anchor Unknowingly Commands Amazon Alexa to Buy a Doll's House

In an unusual AI incident, a news anchor inadvertently triggered an Amazon Echo device to purchase a doll's house during a live broadcast. This demonstrates the need for responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI models to prevent unintended actions and ensure safe and secure AI use.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.465, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.448, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 4.2 — similarity 0.447, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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.