“The machine is randomly laughing at me,” may sound like the words of a crazy person, but in 2018 it turns out that it’s a tech illness versus a mental one.

Today Amazon.com Inc. confirmed widespread reports that Alexa, the “smart” assistant in the company’s Echo smart speakers, is randomly laughing at people.

The issue, first reported by Buzzfeed two days ago, details multiple Amazon Echo users claiming that they were “pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently” as Alexa “sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.”

Amazon confirmed the report today, saying that in some circumstances Alexa-enabled devices can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” Bloomberg noted that under its normal programming, would trigger it to chuckle. How, or even why, it mistakenly hears the phrase was not explained, nor were user complaints that Echo devices were laughing without any voice-prompt at all.

The solution, now implemented by Amazon, is to change the voice prompt required to have an Alexa laugh. “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh,’” an Amazon spokesperson said. In addition, Alexa will now say “Sure, I can laugh,” followed by laughter, so as to seemingly give users prior warning of the laugh itself.

There’s no question that having your Echo randomly laughing, as one user noted late at night, is creepy, but the news itself may also represent peak 2018 craziness and we’re only one week into March.

Photo: PetraGrey/Wikimedia Commons