Illustration of a surreal office scene with neon birds interacting with digital elements around three people near servers and file cabinets; one bird writes on a digital mesh, another carries a paper.

Collected at this site are some absolutely awful uses of AI. Not only in terms of people misunderstanding what technology can and can’t do, but just really bad ideas. For example, Airbnb hosts fraudulently claiming damage via AI-doctored photos, users being able to hack McDonald’s systems by asking for the password, and Microsoft providing ‘therapy’ via LLMs for laid-off workers.

Named after Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts. Well, guess what? Humans have evolved! We’re now so advanced that we’ve outsourced our poor decision-making to machines.

The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilisation—and thought, “You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!” These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn’t just for biology anymore; it’s gone digital, and it’s coming for our entire species.

Because why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?

Source: AI Darwin Awards

Image: IceMing & Digit