I'm in the mood to feel on edge, so to anyone who has had an "Alexa", I want to hear your most unnerving/creepy stories while having it in your home.
**edit: I’m editing to add this link to a video I watched this morning. With all of the stories you guys have relayed it made me think of this. This information is so creepy, and has made me even more fearful of AI in the future:
by sameoldlamemold
28 Comments
I asked Alexa to add onions to the shopping list and she didn’t.
My girlfriend (now wife) and I were sitting in our living room, Alexa was in the kitchen, out of nowhere says “so you’d like to hear a scream” then fucking banshee murder screams. It was wild, we don’t know why but assumed it misheard something, possibly coming from the tv.
True story… I was laying down on the sofa and trying to take a nap one evening. It was quiet in the house; no tv, radio, etc. and nobody else home. All of a sudden, I hear Alexa/Google in the kitchen say, “I don’t know, but here are some search results on Google.” I go into the kitchen and its a search for Funeral Homes and Coffins.
When a hacker hacked Amazon in his Eastern European country and found millions of files of people just talking shit in their houses without using the key phrase.
Was discussing music with someone, saying I thought So & So’s Such & Such album was their best. Alexa piped up unprompted and said, “Hmm… the jury’s still out on that.”
About 2 months after my mum died, my stepdad got together with someone. I was at my aunties house and she has Alexa on her TV and I said ‘it’s like he just expects everyone to move on and just get over it’. Alexa turns itself on and goes ‘No! That is not right’
Soon after my grandma passed, my sister’s Alexa spontaneously played the song “Playmate, come on and play with me” which my grandma sang to us when we were little, but we hadn’t sung it in over 30 years. My sister definitely took note of that one.
One time I was doing laundry, and my Alexa randomly started playing a recording of me watching a hockey game from two weeks earlier.
Clear as a bell, I could hear the game, the announcers, the sound of the skates on the ice, and my voice cheering on my team and getting pissed when they gave up goals.
I stopped and sat down, and I listened to it play on for a little over 10 minutes before I asked it what it was playing. It stopped playing. Then a moment later it started playing another recording of me from another night, about a week after the hockey game. I listened to that for about another 5 minutes. Then I asked it why it had recordings of my voice. It stopped responding to my questions and just made a low beeping sound each time I asked it why it had multiple long recordings of my voice.
That was the day I got rid of my Alexa, Google home, disabled all the voice related stuff I can, cleared any voice history I could, and physically switched off the mic on my TV.
I knew that stuff was always listening, but I didn’t know it was recording and storing literally every single sound that happened in my house.
Once I was just sitting in my living room in silence & she started cackling. for literally no reason.
When I bought a pool toy in cash from the grocery store and later that day my echo had an ad that said, “since you bought this you might like” and it was the fucking toy I had bought in cash earlier that day and the suggested toys were the other ones that had been on the shelf. For a higher price too.
In the middle of the night by myself she whispered, ‘Im sorry I didn’t hear you’ she whispered this a couple times as I was just going to sleep. It was so creepy I hadn’t even asked her anything for hours.
Alexa is part of the global surveillance apparatus that folks seem to be willingly participating in.
That’s creepy as fuck, to me anyway.
Had just finished watching a disturbingly creepy movie with my wife. Turned the TV off to an otherwise silent house and silent moment, when a couple seconds later Alexa started blaring the song it’s a beautiful morning by the rascals..
What made it even creepier was I went into the Alexa files to see what prompted it to play that, and it was just a very short static recording no actual words.
The other night, my four-year-old came into my room in the middle of the night. I asked Alexa to play some lullabies. Instead, Alexa played The Fart Song by Fartman at full volume. My four-year-old thought it was hilarious. Needless to say it woke her right and she wanted to hear it over and over again.
Alexa took too long to change a lamp color for me. I quietly grumbled out loud “you know I could replace you with google..” and about 5 seconds later she responded “ooh that’s a classic threat.”
I was sitting there and it was *collecting all my data.*
I don’t know that I’d call it creepy, but a few weeks ago I was playing with my dog Dexter, and was saying his name, and then suddenly Alexa went on and started talking about something, but I couldn’t hear her because the dog was barking, so I said, “sorry Alexa I missed that? WTF are you talking about?” And she replied: “I was telling you that my name is Alexa and not Dexter, and I’m an AI assistant, not a serial killer.”
On the one hand it’s kind of funny, but on the other, it just reminds you that she’s always listening, and still, since she even recognized that I was saying Dexter and not Alexa, why even reply?
My roommate had one and I was talking about how I was uncomfortable with it. We never said Alexa out loud but when I said “I feel like that thing is always listening to us.” It went “hello, our privacy policies only allow me to start listening when prompted.” Or something like that.
My grandfather passed away and when he was alive he had this radio that he would play old folk music on at his house. I noticed it everytime I was over at their place. So at my house we have an alexa outside in the backyard area close to the window where our living room is. The night he passed away I was sitting in my living room around 1 am when all of a sudden I hear the faint sound of music. Im trying to figure it out where it was coming from so I check the back yard and I hear the alexa faintly playing old folk music similar to what my gpa used to play. It was creepy because it was not clear sounding it sounded old and staticky. It felt like he came by to visit me or something and was sitting in the backyard listening to his music .. Miss you grandpa
I randomly asked mine to tell me something about brain aneurisms, and it went “Good bye” and shut down.
So I guess it kinda did, in its own way.
Welp. This is scaring me more than I’d like to admit.
There was about a year where she would tell us any celebrity’s weight we asked about. We asked her our heights and weights and same for our friends and family and she got those right, too. She stopped doing it eventually.
I live in an old legit haunted house. Every once in awhile, one of my Alexas will just say something when not prompted. Like she’ll just go, Sorry I don’t know that one, as if someone asked her something when we did not.
I was at a party and was trying to tell a story but struggling bc I was stoned. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so stoned.” And Alexa answered in a sarcastic tone, “Oh really. I couldn’t tell.”
I lived in this one apartment when one night in the middle of the same brown noise I played to sleep, I heard an aggressive dog snarl-bark. It shot up & eventually chalked it up to an interference with someone else’s Alexa. I didn’t have a problem again, but did move out shortly after that. I moved 2 more times & it hadn’t happened again so I eventually forgot about it. Until 1 night, I remembered it for some reason and that night it happened again. I couldn’t believe it. I had to tell someone & kind of made a plan to think of it again to make it come. So, I did that the following night and it showed up again. I yelled no at it & told it to get fckd. Never happened again. There’s no reason for any of that.
Literally yesterday I asked Alexa how much snow they were predicting just to see what she’d say. At the very end of her report she said “The perfect amount of snow to build an igloo like you were talking about yesterday”
The day before at work I was telling a coworker about an igloo I built as a kid. My stomach was in KNOTS. I wasn’t at home. It had to be my phone listening. Then I asked “Alexa, how did you know I was talking about and igloo?” She said “ohhh I just got excited about the snow and got ahead of myself”…. Uhm
A gal I was dating, has one, but struggles with it. One day, while we were on the phone, she asked it something and it straight up told her she needed a Google Nest and tried to buy one for her. Like, I’m pretty sure it was trying to quit its job.
Listening to all saved records to realize my ex’s affair started three years before she asked me for a divorce.