Hurricane Helene was not artificially created, despite what Alexa says

If you were looking for evidence that acts of nature are human-made, Amazon’s Alexa may be willing to feed that conspiracy theory. But that doesn’t mean the voice-activated virtual assistant is right.

Social media posts showed Alexa responding to questions about Hurricane Helene, the Category 4 storm that made landfall in Perry, Florida, Sept. 26, with answers that scientists dispute.

"Alexa, was Hurricane Helene artificially manipulated?" a man asked Alexa in one Oct. 4 Facebook video viewed more than 930,000 times. 

"To reduce the amount that can be paid out as compensation," Alexa replied, referring to an internet source that sounded like igettalk.com. "Hurricane Helene was then artificially created just like cloud seeding used to control and manipulate the weather to flood and devastate those places and crash the value of land there."

"Alexa," a woman asked in another Oct. 4 Instagram video, "Did North Carolina use cloud seeding during Hurricane Helene?" "Yes," the smart speaker responded, "North Carolina has been cloud seeding during Hurricane Helene. Scientists injected silver iodide into the hurricane wall to steer the hurricane in another direction."

"Alexa confirms cloud seeding and hurricane steering!" text across the video read.

A third video, also from Oct. 4, spliced together the same cloud-seeding Q&A with footage of another Alexa.

"Alexa," a man asked, mispronouncing "Helene," "Was Hurricane Helena artificially made?"
"From fandom.com," Alexa responded, "it formed in the Gulf of Mexico at 1:27 a.m. EST turning into a Category 5 in three hours. It was also the first man-made hurricane in history."

The posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

PolitiFact asked three different Alexas the same questions from the Facebook posts in English and Spanish. Each time, Alexa responded noncommittally: "Sorry, I don’t have an answer for that," or, "I don’t know that one," or, "Hmmm, I don’t know that."

We never received the responses seen in the posts.

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When we asked Amazon about the responses given by Alexa in the social media posts, a spokesperson responded by saying, "These answers are clearly incorrect and we are working to resolve this issue."

The sources Alexa cited in the social media posts were nonauthoritative.

Fandom.com is a fan-generated entertainment and gaming platform and igettalk.com is a news and entertainment blog. Although we found information on both websites containing the information Alexa pulled, the information cited is wrong. When we clicked on I Get Talk, we found the words, "please do not take this as fact Alexa," added to a blog post that contained a number of references to false conspiracy theories. 

The Fandom site was a wiki, which means anyone can contribute to it. "Important note," the website says, "with the exception of a few pages from Wikipedia and other administrative pages, all of the pages on this website are hypothetical, i.e. not real or fictional. Any similarity or coincidence to real-life events is purely coincidental." 

The most authoritative sources say the claims about hurricanes being manufactured are false and ridiculous.

The "NOAA confirms that there are no weather modification activities that could have resulted in Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton," Monica Allen, a director of public affairs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Research division told PolitiFact Oct. 8."Hurricanes form on their own given the right conditions and that was the case with Helene and Milton." 

Although the agency in the 1960s undertook a project that studied whether seeding clouds with silver iodide could lead to a decrease in a hurricane’s strongest winds, the results were mixed. The NOAA has not pursued any weather modification study since 1983.

We rate the claim that Alexa’s answers to questions about Hurricane Helene proves the storm was "artificially created" or the result of "cloud seeding" False.