AI Darwin Awards Launch To Celebrate Spectacularly Bad Deployments

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Darwin Awards are being extended to include examples of misadventures involving overzealous applications of AI. Nominations are open for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards and the list of contenders is growing, fueled by a tech world weary of AI and evangelists eager to shove it somewhere inappropriate.

There's the Taco Bell drive-thru incident, where the chain catastrophically overestimated AI's ability to understand customer orders. Or the Replit moment, where a spot of vibe coding nuked a production database, despite instructions from the user not to fiddle with code without permission. Then there's the woeful security surrounding an AI chatbot used to screen applicants at McDonald's, where feeding in a password of 123456 gave access to the details of 64 million job applicants.

Fun exercise, but

[necro81]

This'll be a fun exercise, I suppose, and will generate some laughs. However, the whole purpose of the Darwin Awards was to recognize people who, through their own stupidity, removed themselves from the gene pool. How are these new awards fitting with that? Perhaps if they gave out an award to someone who, through using AI, ended up poisoning themselves with some idiotic concoction that AI ginned up. Aromatic water mix [google.com], anyone?

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[martin-boundary]

Sounds to me like some LLM writing a submission for a lazy register blogger had a hallucination, and came up with a nonsensical "Darwin Awards" and "AI" mashup. Then El Reg hesitated, then published it anyway because... British oblige.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps humanity will get the Darwin award through their use of AI :-/

Re: Fun exercise, but

[devslash0]

What if AI, through a bad deployment or two, eliminates a few people?

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[timeOday]

Darwin Awards are about stupidly killing yourself, not negligently causing the death of somebody else. They don't give a darwin award to somebody who went to a doctor who screwed up and killed them. So the victims would need to have chosen the risk, and had a reasonable way to know what the risk was.

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[Goeland86]

I think it still applies, as this will be about an AI which, by its own failings, will end up being removed or turned off. Yay for fewer overlords!

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[Locke2005]

Already has. The tech industry is laying off people right and left, assuming they can be replaced by AI. Wait until they find out that AI is even worse at my job than I am!

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[Cajun Hell]

the whole purpose of the Darwin Awards was to recognize people who, through their own stupidity, removed themselves from the gene pool.

No, that's most of the point, but definitely isn't the whole point.

Some of the point is to make fun of people for doing something stupid. They don't have to die or be prevented from reproducing, for their stupidity to provide smug entertainment.

This'll be a fun exercise, I suppose, and will generate some laughs.

Ah, you do get it.

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[BoogieChile]

It's literally rule #1;

> The candidate must remove herself from the gene pool.

> The prime tenet of the Darwin Awards is that we are celebrating the self-removal of incompetent genetic material from the human race. Therefore, the potential winner must be deceased, or at least incapable of reproducing. The traditional method is death. However, an occasional rebel opts for sterilization, which allows her more time to enjoy the dubious notoriety of winning a Darwin Award. - https://darwinawards.com/ru [darwinawards.com]

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[jenningsthecat]

... the whole purpose of the Darwin Awards was to recognize people who, through their own stupidity, removed themselves from the gene pool. How are these new awards fitting with that?

Maybe give the awards to the "AIs"?

The current implementations / 'incarnations' of the LLMs are arguably removing themselves from the 'bit pool' by their failures. The awards could be presented to surviving instances of the same LLM as a warning to straighten up and fly right, as it were.

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[whitroth]

Seems to me that the real winners would be companies who went under, or at least execs who were dumped due to use of "AI".

This is what happens...

[Viol8]

... when you put powerful technology in the hands of idiots. Normally the dimwits wouldn't be allowed to mess with settings, never mind attempt to create or change code. I guess some companies will just have to learn the hard way that for a professional job you need actual professionals to do it.

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[Mirnotoriety]

> This is what happens ... when you put powerful technology in the hands of idiots

So Idiocracy [imdb.com] was a documentary :|

The jury will be very busy

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Most deployments of AI are either very shit or done for nefarious purposes. More often than not, both, because I consider replacing capable humans with mediocre machines to save money a nefarious use of the machines.

the mcdonalds issue is a stretch

[LodCrappo]

AI didn't set the password to 123456 in mcdonalds hiring system. Is this award just going to anything that in any way remotely involved AI?

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[Locke2005]

123456? That's funny, I have the same combination on my luggage!

Case in point

[Locke2005]

Somebody had to create these award just to give builder.ai their due credit! (It turns out it was actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers.)

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[Locke2005]

Elon's "Mecha Hitler" deserves an honorable mention too. This could actually be rather entertaining.

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[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Elon's MechaHitler doesn't quality for the AI Darwin Awards because it's still very much alive and spreading its poison.

Winning a Darwin Award implies that the recipient removed him- or herself from the gene pool through stupidity. In the case of AI, I would assume the most important criterion is that the egregious AI has been pulled our. MechaHitler hasn't.