Is the conspiracy theory that hurricanes are planned or controlled supported by Amazon's Alexa supposedly revealing the death toll and damage amount from Hurricane Milton days before the storm even made landfall? No, that's not true: Hurricanes cannot be controlled and neither Amazon's Alexa, nor anyone else, has knowledge of precise storm impact statistics beforehand. Alexa now responds, "Sorry, I don't have an answer for that" when asked about the impact of Hurricane Milton after Amazon corrected its glitch. A climate science expert told Lead Stories "no technology that humans have can create, destroy, modify, intensify, or steer hurricanes in any way, shape, or form."
The 23-second video (archived here) appeared on X on October 7, 2024. The post was captioned:
I'm perplexed. Listen.
Alexa, how many lives were lost during Hurricane Milton?
Alexa reports damage costs and fatalities from #HurricaneMilton that hasn't hit Florida yet. Yesterday she reported where it hit and its category.
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Oct 08 15:26:34 2024 UTC)
The video's image is a looping GIF from cyclonicwx.com showing Hurricane Milton as it appeared between 11 a.m. and noon EDT on October 7, 2024. At that time the eye of the hurricane was west of the Yucatán Peninsula. At the time of writing, on October 8, 2024, Milton was expected to reach Florida the night of October 9, 2024, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The audio in the post on X features the voice of a woman asking:
Alexa, How many lives were lost during Hurricane Milton?
The voice of the digital assistant responds:
Overall extreme Hurricane Milton caused 21.3 billion dollars in damages and caused 262 fatalities.
At 17 seconds in, the woman says the time for the record, misstating the date as October 8, 2024, as she adds the time -- "12:15 p.m. Central Time." The video was posted on X on October 7, 2024. She posted a correction later, "*October 7, 2024 12:15 PM CT."
Lead Stories reached out to the public relations desk at Amazon to ask about Alexa's answer. An Amazon spokesperson responded on October 8, 2024, saying:
These answers are clearly incorrect and we are working to resolve this issue.
Several minutes later Lead Stories asked Alexa the question originally asked by the woman, and this time Alexa's reply was:
Sorry, I don't have an answer for that.
Information Lead Stories received for a previous fact check about Hurricane Helene also answers the unstated suggestion in this X post that Hurricane Milton is planned. Howard Diamond, Ph.D., director of the Atmospheric Sciences and Modeling Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Air Resources Laboratory, told us "... Hurricane Helene, as is the case for any hurricane, formed on its own given the right conditions of sea surface temperature and upper atmospheric winds ... no technology that humans have can create, destroy, modify, intensify, or steer hurricanes in any way, shape, or form."
Amazon's digital assistant Alexa gets answers from existing content on the internet found through Microsoft's Bing search engine. The community notes added to the post on X suggested that a fandom called "Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki" may have been the source of the prediction statistics. The page for hypothetical Hurricane Milton has been taken down due to "misinformation concerns" according to the site page, but statistics on the archived copy of the page do not match those cited by Alexa.
Also, some of the digital assistant's answers come from contributors to Alexa Answers:
Alexa Answers is a community where Amazon users can answer questions for Alexa. It contains questions in categories such as Science, History, Literature, and Music which Alexa would like your help in answering. Contributors can see the impact their answers have through points, shares, and feedback from Alexa and Alexa users.
Lead Stories has published several fact checks on false claims involving Alexa (here) as well as on the conspiracy theory that severe weather is planned and controlled (here).
