Fictitious Hurricane Milton article shared by Amazon Alexa
- Published on October 10, 2024 at 22:40
- 3 min read
- By Alexia PARTOUCHE, AFP USA
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"HURRICANE MILTON HASNT EVEN HIT YET BUT!!!!! ALEXA KNOWS Get ready PEOPLE!!!" says the caption of an October 6, 2024 X post.
"This is weird. It looks like Hurricane Milton is another pre-planned catastrophe and Alexa is saying it is a category 5 before it even makes landfall in Florida," says another October 6 X post.
Both include a video of the AI assistant responding to a question about Hurricane Milton saying: "From Fandom.com: Hurricane Milton was a extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane that caused widespread damage across its path in October 2024."
Several other videos of Alexas repeating the phrase were posted to X.
Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 storm in the US state of Florida on October 9, 2024, just weeks after Hurricane Helene slammed the state. As of October 10, at least 10 people have died as a result of the hurricane.
Posts claiming the clips were evidence that the storm was planned in advance continued a trend of misinformation about natural disasters in the United States.
But the videos capture Alexa pulling information from an unreliable source.
"These answers are clearly incorrect and we are working to resolve this issue," an Amazon spokesperson told AFP.
Katja Muñoz, a technology research fellow at the Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology in Berlin, Germany, told AFP on October 8 that Alexa devices use sources that are ranked highly based on engagement, "not exclusively on veracity" (archived here).
She said Alexa can easily state as fact something "which is simply not true."
Hypothetical hurricanes
The text can be traced to the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki hosted on Fandom.com, an entertainment and gaming platform, where users can create articles for imaginary hurricanes (archived here).
The wiki had a "Hurricane Milton" page, which described a fictional hurricane that swept through the US state of Florida and the Caribbean in mid-October 2024. The article's summary matches the answer Alexa gave to users.
Other information in the article, including the date of landfall and the path of the storm, does not correspond with details about the real Hurricane Milton.
The page was deleted from the wiki on October 7, 2024, according to a screenshot of the page’s deletion log taken that day. A note next to the edit details says: "Deleting due to misinformation concern."
In a message visible on one user's public message wall, Fandom.com's Director of Community Safety Tim Quievryn said he deleted the page to prevent people from mistaking it for accurate information about the real storm (archived here).
"As I know you're aware, the Hurricane Milton page drew a lot of attention from people Googling the term, who do not understand this wiki is fictional," Quievryn said.
"I am doing this unilaterally out of protecting the public interest in receiving correct and real-world information about this storm," he said.
More of AFP’s reporting on hurricane misinformation can be found here.
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