This clip has been circulating widely on social media purporting to show an Amazon Alexa (a virtual assistant available on Amazon devices) referring to Hurricane Milton in the past tense and responding to questions about fatalities, damage costs and category levels even though it had not yet struck.

The most viral posts claim that the answers were given by Alexa on October 6 or 7. Hurricane Milton hit Florida on the evening of October 9. At the time of writing, Hurricane Milton is still sweeping across the state, causing mass power outages and flooding.

Some posters have used these clips to further claim that this is proof of Hurricane Milton being planned or orchestrated – claiming that weather manipulation is being used as a means of controlling the population.

Alexa is a virtual assistant that currently responds to queries posed by users through processing audio commands and searching the internet (through various suppliers such as instance Yelp, Bing Search, AccuWeather or Wikipedia) for answers. To find out where Alexa got the specific statistics, we attempted to Google specific phrases to see if any identical sentences or statistics appear anywhere else on the internet. However, this did not yield any results.

But, in some of the claim clips, Alexa cites “fandom.com” as its source. Fandom.com is a wiki hosting service for a wide variety of topics. We looked further and found a specific wiki hosted by fandom.com called “Hypothetical Hurricanes” that appears to serve as a platform for hurricane enthusiasts to write about fictional hurricanes in detail. The site itself emphasises that the information on the various hurricane pages is “not real or fictional” despite the layout closely resembling Wikipedia.

As of October 9 the page titled “Hurricane Milton” is blank, however, it appears highly likely that Alexa scraped this website for information in answer to questions about the hurricane.

We plugged the Hurricane Milton page into the Wayback Machine and found a note from October 8 that moderators had deleted its contents “to prevent misinformation concerns.”

Going back further to October 5, we were able to see what the Hurricane Milton page looked like with user-added hypothetical details and statistics. The page also shows the fictional Hurricane Milton’s hypothetical category level, and even specifics counties and regions where it hit.

Therefore, it is highly unlikely that Alexa “knew” details about Hurricane Milton before it hit. Alexa works by searching the internet for existing information and does not in itself have access to any secret or “future” knowledge. It is most likely that Alexa found the Hypothetical Hurricanes wiki in its search about Hurricane Milton and used the fictional information on that page in its answers. We give this claim a rating of false.

While virtual assistants can be helpful in retrieving information in a convenient, hands-free way, it is also important to be cautious of the answers they give. In this case, Alexa using an incorrect source led to misinformation and confusion among users – sparking conspiracy theories that are still going viral on social media.

As a further experiment, we asked ChatGPT and Meta AI the same questions about Hurricane Milton, got conflicting information about Hurricanes from 1990 and 2022 respectively.As more and more of us turn to sources such as virtual assistants and AI chatbots in place of search engines, being vigilant and thinking critically is more necessary than ever. Instead of relying on a single source for news and answers, cross-checking between a variety of sources such as news outlets, search engines, and official organisations is key to preventing the spread of mis/disinformation.