These Parents Frantically Trying To Stop ‘Alexa’ From Playing Porn Are All Of Us

Little boy’s innocent request somehow gets Alexa to pull up porn

Isn’t technology amazing? We have so many advanced devices that help us do pretty much anything at the touch of a button. This means our kids are growing up with access to all the information in the world, which presents some special challenges that previous generations of parents never had to think about.

Like a kid managing to find porn in the literal blink of an eye.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last half of 2016 (and if you were, it was probably the best way to handle these last few terrible months) you’ve probably heard of Alexa, Amazon’s answer to Siri. Dubbed a “personal assistant,” Alexa, through a device called the Amazon Echo, responds to commands to look up information. She can play music or videos, stream podcasts, set alarms, make to-do lists, or destroy your child’s innocence, as one family found out when their little boy asked Alexa to do his toddlerly bidding.

Check out the horrifying/hilarious video, but clear the kiddos from the room first. This is definitely not appropriate.

The boy says, “Alexa, play digger digger” and presses the button, patiently waiting for his request to be answered. We’re guessing that’s some kind of fun construction vehicle-related song or cartoon.

Alexa, however, had other ideas.

In response to the little guy’s innocent query, her robotic voice starts coming in hot saying, “You want to hear a station for porn detected” and he softly says, “OK” right before Alexa spits out a slew of words including porno, hot, chick, amateur, girl, sexy, and a bunch of NSFW porn terms we refuse to type. The boy’s parents fly into action begging Alexa to stop her X-rated offerings, and the video stops there.

Now, before anyone heads into judgment mode, please understand how easy it is for things like this to happen. Even under direct supervision, this kid had porn ready to blare from the speakers and all he asked for was a fun song about diggers. Literally no parent could’ve seen this coming.

Last year, my kids used our on-demand programming to pull up something called “The Sex Awards” after learning to spell “sex” on the bus from some douchey sixth grader. Our parental locks covered channels the kids shouldn’t see, but did nothing about the on-demand shows, and that’s how our children saw some actress accept a trophy for Best Lesbian Kissing Scene. It was not our best moment as parents, but it was a learning experience. Now, our on-demand and everything else is strictly password-protected. Lesson learned, totally the hard way.

For Amazon’s part, they told Mashable, “This issue has been fixed, and we are working to build additional restrictions to prevent this from happening in the future,” the spokesperson said. “We have also contacted the customer to apologize.”

It’s nice of Amazon to apologize, but in the age of information, this is something we have to expect and prepare for. As technology evolves, so must we. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go test our parental controls one more time.