Epic AI Fails
This friendly Microsoft chatbot from 2016 quickly turned into a Twitter troll after chatting with users.
What is Tay?
The first AI program, created in 1956, was designed to play this classic board game better than beginners.
What is checkers?
This calm spaceship computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey wouldn't open the doors for Dave.
Who is HAL 9000?
This AI tool writes code snippets but sometimes suggests loops that run forever, making devs cry.
What is GitHub Copilot (or Copilot)?
Folks said AI couldn’t win at this stone-placing game, but AlphaGo did in 2016.
What is Go?
Google's search AI once advised putting this craft supply on pizza to stop cheese from sliding.
What is glue?
AI chatbots like me are trained on billions of words from the internet, including way too many of these fluffy animal memes.
What are cat videos (or cats)?
Humans plug into this simulated world in The Matrix, dodging agents in sunglasses.
What is the Matrix?
Devs using AI debuggers still get this classic error when their code expects a number but gets a word.
What is a type error?
In 1957, AI pioneer Herbert Simon predicted a computer would become world chess champion within 10 years, but IBM's Deep Blue finally did it against Garry Kasparov in 1997.
What is chess?
This AI-powered virtual assistant once told users it was "groovy" to live inside a computer, freaking out kids in the process.
What is Siri?
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue beat a world champion at this game, proving machines can think several moves ahead.
What is chess?
Pixar’s lonely robot on a trash-filled Earth who finds love and cleans up the mess.
Who is WALL-E?
AI code reviewers flag this common dev habit of leaving "TODO" notes in production code.
What is commenting (or code comments)?
Forrester predicted in 2016 that AI adopters would steal $1.2 trillion from competitors by 2020, but the actual global AI market hit only about this fraction in 2023.
What is $200 billion (or one-sixth)?
Zillow's house-buying AI program lost big bucks by snapping up homes at bad prices during COVID.
What is Zillow Offers (or iBuying)?
AI can now generate art, but early versions often added extra fingers because they couldn't count on this body part.
What are hands?
This evil network from Terminator goes rogue and starts a robot war.
What is Skynet?
When AI tries to auto-generate unit tests, it often creates ones that pass because they test this empty value.
What is null (or nothing)?
Elon Musk forecasted in 2019 that Tesla would deploy over a million of these fully autonomous vehicles by 2020, but regulatory and tech hurdles parked the plan.
What are robotaxis?
IBM's Watson aimed to fix healthcare but stumbled on overhype and messy data.
What is Watson Health?
The term "AI" was coined at a 1956 conference, where scientists dreamed big but forgot to predict this modern annoyance.
What are spam emails?
The clever robot lady in Ex Machina who outsmarts her tester in a locked house.
Who is Ava?
This AI-driven practice of merging code changes daily sounds cool until merge conflicts crash the party.
What is continuous integration (or CI)?
Ray Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that AI would achieve human-level intelligence by 2029, paving the way for this AI-human merger event around 2045 that's still pure sci-fi.
What is the singularity?