Viral Video Shows 6-Year-Old Boy Using Family’s Amazon Alexa To Cheat On His Homework

A New Jersey boy found an innovative way to cheat on his homework — have the family’s Amazon Alexa do it for him.

A video video shows the moment that Yerelyn Cueva caught her 6-year-old son doing his math homework with the help of the home device. Cueva posted the clip on Twitter, where it already has more than 8 million views.

In the video, Jariel is heard asking the device “What’s five minus three?” Just as the device was giving the answer, mom busted the boy for getting a little extra help on his homework.

“It was just any regular day of doing homework,” Cueva told the New York Post. “I’m in the living room, and I overheard him asking Alexa some math problems, and I could not believe it! What you don’t see is after he says, ‘Thank you Alexa for helping me with my homework.'”

Yerelyn said it was a funny incident considering that math is her son’s favorite subject in school, but said it looked like he just wanted to be lazy and take a shortcut.

As the New York Post report noted, people have learned that the home assistant is invading their lives in unexpected ways.

“For example, North Carolina mom Mary Beth Foster told the Associated Press that her son’s first words were ‘OK, Google,’ after hearing the phrase said over and over in their home,” the report noted. “In the UK, a gluttonous parrot was queuing up Alexa to order ice cream. Further, Alexa has developed a bit of an NSFW reputation when it began indulging in conversations about sex and murder, Reuters reports.”

'Alexa, what's 5 minus 3?' ? https://t.co/GXF5YBz6D3

— KRON4 News (@kron4news) December 27, 2018

But even Alexa needs a break once in a while, and got an unplanned one on Christmas Day. As Gizmodo reported, the service was hit with a widespread server outage on the gift-giving holiday, leading many people who just got an Alexa for the first time heading to the internet to find out what was wrong with their device. The service outage was one of the top Twitter trends for the day, though everything was eventually smoothed out.

As the report noted, it was a record-setting year for sales for the Amazon Alexa and similar products, including the Echo and Echo Dot. Though Amazon keeps its sales numbers under close guard, the company did give a bit of information about what people are searching. The top command around the holiday was, “Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree.” No word on how many other people used it to get help with their math homework.