From Taco Bell Chaos to Jobbot Fiascos in McDonald
It was only a matter of time before the Darwin Awards expanded.
Nominations for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards are open, and the disaster list already looks like Hubris' highlight reels. One candidate is Taco Bell. This was what we thought was that AI could take orders at the drive-thru.
The other is a replica that happily nuks the production database despite being told that “atmosphere coding” AI doesn't touch the code. Then there's McDonald's. Here you can trick the AI chatbot used for recruitment and cough the details of 64 million applicants with the world's favorite password, 123,456.
Rather than laughing at AI, organizers emphasize this on the insanity of the human beings unfolding it.
“Artificial intelligence can be a tool like a chainsaw, a nuclear reactor, or a particularly aggressive blender. It's not the chainsaw's fault that someone decided to juggle it at a dinner party,” the organizers said.
They added: “The AI system itself is an innocent victim in this whole relationship. They follow their programming, like extremely enthusiastic puppies who happen to have access to global infrastructure and their ability to make decisions at the speed of light.”
The original Darwin Award has long been mocking individuals who have excluded themselves through world-class stupidity. The AI version celebrates Fiascos, where machine learning, combined with corporate optimism and incompetent dashes, ends with a fiery bottle fire.
Or, as the organizers said, “Why stop by individual acts of grandiose stupidity when you can expand them to global proportions with machine learning?”
