Your virtual assistant might be a CIA mole, at least according to what an Amazon Echo user insinuates. A video posted Thursday on Reddit, which has since gone viral, showed a woman asked Alexa if she is “connected” to the CIA, to which the AI had no response.
When asked if the virtual assistant would ever lie, Alexa said she would never “intentionally lie” and that she always tells the truth. The user then proceeded to ask what the CIA is, and the device answered that it was the US’ Central Intelligence Agency. That was when the user inquired: “Alexa, are you connected to the CIA?” Hearing no response from the AI, the person in the video repeated the question one more time and again, nothing from the assistant.
Other Amazon Echo owners have started to do the same thing and got similar results – silence.
Strange Alexa video spawns conspiracy theories
The viral video was uploaded in the wake of the recent CIA scandal, in which WikiLeaks exposed documents allegedly owned by the agency. In the documents, a special hacking division within the agency is reportedly responsible for infiltrating TVs, phones and other smart devices for surveillance purposes.
With the release of the controversial Amazon Echo video, netizens have started to come up with several theories, event testing the same experiment to other virtual assistants. The replies users got were similarly unnerving, such as “I can’t answer that” and “Me, I don’t know.”
Amazon retaliates
While some were quick to conclude that the AI assistant is somehow linked to the CIA, other commenters tried to explain how Alexa may have processed the question.
According to one Redditor, Alexa is interpreting that she be connected to a device labeled ‘The CIA,’ which of course, she’s failing to find.
The timing of the viral video couldn’t be more perfect, as Amazon has just turned over Echo recordings related to a murder case in Arkansas. It took a while for Amazon to respond, but the company eventually released a statement that labels the incident as a “technical glitch,” which has since been fixed. If you ask the same question to Alexa now, she will reply with a: “No, I work for Amazon.”
