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Look, we’ll be the first to admit that online writers can get a little “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” about the upcoming robot apocalypse. Just because robotics engineers have taught their creepy little charges fundamentally human tasks like opening doors, writing bad movie scripts, or brushing off Piers Morgan, doesn’t mean they’re all about to rise up and murder us in our sleep. After all, it’s not like any of those bots are actually in our homes right now, doing unsettling things their programmers didn’t intend, for reasons no one actually understands. Right?


Anyway, The Verge reports today that Amazon’s ubiquitous Alexa system has started creepily laughing, unprompted, in people’s homes, which means we should probably just jump to the endpoint here and start blasting the damn things with a shotgun. Reports of the laughter—which sounds a bit like a creepy little kid ghost, as if we weren’t freaked out enough already—have started popping up over the last few weeks from concerned Alexa-enabled device owners, as multiple users have stated they’ve even been disconnecting their devices to get away from the sounds. The “glitch” can apparently occur without the machines being prompted to wake, or—and this is fun—when asking them to turn on the lights, which should be a lot of fun during a bleary 2 a.m. bathroom run.


Amazon has actually admitted that it knows about the issue, and is working on the fix, even though we’re pretty sure we already covered the safest method with the “blast it with a shotgun, now, FUCKING NOW” strategy outlined up above. Anyway, we can only hope the company will get this sorted out soon, so that Alexa can get back to its regular, non-creepy duties, like playing music, or listening to everything that happens in our homes and collecting the ad data for a massive, faceless corporate machine.