Famous AI Fails

Not all companies disclose technical failures. The news cycle is typically not good for business or stock prices. When you see a news of a disaster, it's usually only the uncontainable smoke. Today's post is to look at some of the more famous signs that we are not as ready as big business hopes to be - when testing a pure human replacement.

May 2025 - Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer publishes a summer reading list - of books that don't exist

• While many of the authors names were real, fake titles were attributed to them. For example: Tidewater Dreams by famed Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende, does not exist.

April 2025, Mike Lidell's defense team files a brief with hallucinated case law.

• Lawyers for the defense are admonished by the judge after several references in case law, misquotes and other anomalies are discovered in a brief filed with the court.

June 2024 McDonald’s ends AI experiment after drive-thru ordering blunders

• After working with IBM for three years to leverage AI to take drive-thru orders, McDonald’s called the whole thing off in June 2024. The reason? A slew of social media videos showing confused and frustrated customers trying to get the AI to understand their orders.

In an April 2024 post on X, Grok, the AI chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, falsely accused NBA star Klay Thompson of throwing bricks through windows of multiple houses in Sacramento, California.

March 2024 - NYC AI chatbot encourages business owners to break the law

• MyCity falsely claims that business owners could take a cut of their workers’ tips, fire workers who complain of sexual harassment, and serve food that had been nibbled by rodents.

In February 2024, Air Canada was ordered to pay damages to a passenger after its virtual assistant gave him incorrect information

Zillow winds down operation on Zillow Offers

• In November 2021, Zillow told shareholders it would wind down its Zillow Offers operations and cut 25% of the company’s workforce over the next several quarters. The home-flipping unit’s problems were the result of the error rate in the ML algorithm it used to predict home prices.

June 23 - National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) was shutting down its chat bot for suggesting callers with an eating disorder go on a diet.

• "The recommendations that Tessa gave me was that I could lose 1 to 2 pounds per week, that I should eat no more than 2,000 calories in a day, that I should have a calorie deficit of 500-1,000 calories per day," Maxwell says. "All of which might sound benign to the general listener. However, to an individual with an eating disorder, the focus of weight loss really fuels the eating disorder."

With this many high profile problems, does this mean the end of AI? Certainly not. Statistics and probability have been the cornerstone of business decisions for centuries. As we understand more about the world we live in, and have more data evidence to support it, these decisions only get better. What these fails highlight is that the industry is running around with a hammer pretending everything is a nail. Just like with the internet itself, soon enough businesses will understand that AI and ML are a scalpel, and can solve amazing problems when wielded as such.