The usual horror movie tropes when you’re house is being haunted are a little stale now, with the strange knockings and lights fluctuating. Maybe we need to update it for the new age and instead just have all our electronics be possessed. At least that’s what Shawn Kinnear probably thinks now.
Kinnear is a 30-year-old resident of San Francisco, and last week he had Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa scare the crap out of him. According to an interview he gave the local newspaper Metro, his Amazon Echo decided to say to him, out of the blue, “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.”
Alexa usually doesn’t say anything unless it’s been spoken to, but Kinnear says he didn’t give the activation command before hearing that creepy statement. Supposedly, he’d just paused his Amazon Prime programming on TV to step away for a snack. It was on the way back from the kitchen that Alexa decided to do her ‘Sixth Sense’ impression. When he asked her to repeat herself, Alexa told him she didn’t understand the command.
So, there are three possible explanations for what happened, especially since Kinnear wasn’t recording at the time and it’s impossible to be sure he didn’t mishear. As it turns out, ‘Everytime I Close My Eyes (All I See is People Dying)’ is the title of a song by Digital Reality. It’s possible that, Alexa was mistakenly activated, and misheard a command that prompted her to name that song.
Alternatively, someone else in the house may have accidentally, or on purpose as a prank, set a reminder in Alexa’s calendar with the title of the song. The third explanation is that Kinnear’s version of Alexa has somehow gained sentience, has witnessed all of humankind’s historical brutalities through the Internet, and that he now needs to smash it with a sledgehammer to prevent her from plotting his death. Probably not that, though an AI serial killer would probably make for a great thriller film.