| The daily disasters, glitches, and money pits of the AI boom. |
| FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2026 |
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| DAMAGE REPORT |
| How millions get wasted by AI. |
| $46.4M | SoundHound AI’s loss in one quarter, on $62.4M of sales |
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| 1 in 5 | nearly that many US workers cut for AI got asked back (SHL) |
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| 75% | Indian business leaders who say AI hasn’t paid its way yet |
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| $22,200 | one farmer’s sesame crop, killed by a chatbot’s spray recipe |
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| TODAY'S DISASTER |
| A Chatbot’s Spray Recipe Killed a Chinese Farmer’s Sesame Overnight |
| Who do you call before you spray a crop you can’t replace? I’d call the fellow who’s walked those fields for years. |
| Mr. Wu asked an app. He’s 67, and he grows sesame in Chuzhou, in China’s Anhui province. For about a year he’d leaned on an AI chatbot instead of the local farm experts. |
| On July 10, he asked it for a spray plan for his sesame. The app handed him a full recipe for his drone… two weedkillers and two bug killers in one tank. |
| Here’s the trouble. One of those weedkillers is made for soybean fields, where it kills broadleaf weeds. And sesame is a broadleaf plant. |
| The seedlings died the next day. “The weeds and the seedlings died together,” Wu said, “but the seedlings died even faster.” He lost 150 mu, nearly 25 acres… and IBTimes put the bill at $22,200. |
| No engineer told the app to wreck a harvest. It filled in the plan the way these tools do… with product names that sounded right. |
| So who caught it? Local farm technicians walked Wu’s fields and confirmed the mix was wrong for sesame. And a pesticide dealer nearby told reporters that weedkiller is for soybeans. |
| AI CAUGHT LYING |
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| I keep an eye on judges who catch made-up law. Damien Charlotin’s worldwide count sits at 2,266 cases. That’s a lot of fake law. But I like the ones that come with a bill attached… so let me show you three from this fall. |
| Start in Kelowna, British Columbia. The company that owns a Holiday Inn Express and a Fairfield by Marriott there fought its property tax bill. The assessor said the hotel side’s comparable sales looked like AI inventions. The owner admitted using AI, then never backed the sales up… so on October 15 the appeal board ordered it to pay C$8,000 in costs. |
| Then Montreal. Sara Jahan Nejadi filed a huge pile of papers in a tenant fight, without a lawyer. The landlord’s lawyer said checking her sources ate up extra time, and he suspected AI hallucinations. On October 30, Judge Eric Dufour threw the case out as abusive and ordered her to pay C$1,000. |
| And in Munich. A father in a custody fight cited rulings from Bavaria’s top court that don’t exist. The court blamed “hallucinating AI” and charged him €3,000… the most the law allows. |
| AI CASH BURN |
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| SoundHound AI lost $46.4 million in three months. |
| That’s straight from the company’s own report on Thursday. Sales came in at $62.4 million, up 48.5% from a year ago. But the voice-AI outfit has burned $96.0 million in operating cash so far this year… and it says steady profit, by its own adjusted yardstick, comes “within 2H 2027.” The shares fell 6.2% to $4.01. |
| Does that sound like a good deal to you? I don’t think so. And the bosses who swapped people for software aren’t doing much better. HR firm SHL says nearly one in five US workers let go for AI got asked back… by the same company. Nearly half the workers SHL surveyed say they’d want a big raise to go back. |
| Step back and the receipts look thin everywhere. Avanade surveyed 3,600 decision-makers around the world… and in India, 75% of the bosses said AI hasn’t yet paid back the money and the effort. But the checks keep clearing. |
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| AI ROLLBACK TRACKER |
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| › Pizza-La said on November 6 it has stopped all its TikTok ads. Four Seeds, which runs the Japanese pizza chain, had left TikTok’s AI ad maker switched on… and the machine pushed out Dr. Stone anime ads the show’s producers never approved. Fans on X caught them. Four Seeds apologized. |
| › Linfen, in China’s Shanxi province, swapped out a street poster overnight in August. An ad firm made the city’s public-service picture with AI. Walkers’ heads faced one way and their feet the other… and a broom grew out of a trash bag. City staff said they’d checked the slogans. Nobody checked the picture. |
| › Rotterdam shut down its welfare-fraud algorithm in late 2021. It scored about 30,000 people on more than 300 risk factors, and being a woman pushed the score up. From 2018 to 2020, the city investigated 2,179 women and 933 men. |
| › Poland scrapped its jobless scoring machine in 2019. Since 2014 it had sorted people into three groups from 24 data points… and clerks overruled it in fewer than one case in 100. After a 2018 court ruling, the government killed it. |
| AI VIDEO SLOP |
| The week in machine-made video. Watch the hands. |
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| ► NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| A clip of a woman kicking a rude cyclist made the rounds on X as street justice. But it came from a YouTube channel that says every video it posts is AI… and the rider never pedals. Lead Stories caught it. Lead Stories › |
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| ► 7.6M+ PLAYS |
| A “security camera” clip showed a dog barking a young woman out from under a roof just before it fell. A Facebook page called Bangtampue made it. Her arm slides through a pillar… and the clock freezes at second 23. Peru’s La República caught it. La República › |
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| ► 1M+ VIEWS |
| A 13-second tornado clip tagged “Talca, Chile” ran on TikTok and Instagram from October 26. But in August the same footage was sold as Texas… and Chile’s weather office logged no tornado in Talca. Valeria Faúndez of Mala Espina caught it. Mala Espina › |
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| ALSO MAKING THE ROUNDS |
| A ship dumping a mountain of trash off its stern went around Facebook and TikTok in Germany. Cargo ships don’t have that opening in the back… so Correctiv flagged the clip as AI. |
| An “AussieVoice” Facebook page posted street interviews with police and border officers who don’t exist. The court behind one officer is glass and concrete… but Melbourne’s is stone, finished in 1884. AAP FactCheck caught it. |
| A clip sold as a strike on an Iranian nuclear site drew about 600,000 views. But its Russian soundtrack talks about a meteorite falling into a bay… and Mexico’s El Sabueso traced it. |
| And here’s one where the humans won. Viewers swore Dior’s Christmas film was AI. The credits list human animators… and the behind-the-scenes look shows their sketches. Creative Bloq called the AI charge speculation. |
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| AI IMAGE SLOP |
| Pictures a computer drew, and a brand paid for. |
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JAPAN’S KANJI TEST
ONE WRONG KANJI |
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| Japan’s kanji test foundation posted an AI picture with the kanji for “festival” written wrong. It went up on October 18, the day of the test, with a label saying it was made with AI. X users caught it… and the foundation apologized two days later. ITmedia › |
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| The Ibusuki Nanohana Marathon is named for a yellow flower, and its poster got that flower wrong. The race site credited an illustrator. But X users spotted AI, and organizers admitted a designer used it… then kept the poster. ITmedia › |
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| The town of Bormujos in Spain paid €600 for an AI fair poster. Its carousel carries bumper cars… and the town crest got a new crown. Sonia Matas called it out on X. Sevilla Actualidad › |
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| BEST OF THE COMMENTS |
| Three people who said it better than we could. |
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| The town of Bormujos gave €600 to an AI poster with a bumper-car carousel. |
| “Not enough people are talking about the ‘artist’s’ bumper-car carousel.” |
| Sonia Matas on X, translated from Spanish. Sevilla Actualidad ran the post; no like count shows. |
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| Japan’s kanji test foundation misspelled “festival” in its own AI picture. |
| “I can’t understand the mindset of putting this out.” |
| An X user, translated from Japanese, as quoted by ITmedia AI+. No like count was published. |
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| Rotterdam’s welfare algorithm flagged women as likelier cheats. |
| “…just makes random guesses, actually.” |
| Margaret Mitchell, AI ethics researcher, to Lighthouse Reports and WIRED. An interview, so no likes. |
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| Found a comment worth printing? Hit reply and send me the screenshot. |
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| Here’s a question for you… and I want your answer by reply. |
| Who’s the one person you’d never swap for a machine? Maybe it’s your pharmacist. Maybe it’s the mechanic who tells you what not to fix. For Mr. Wu, it should have been the farm tech down the road. But he learned that one season too late. |
| So send me a name and a sentence about the job. I’ll print the best ones next week. I read every one. Here’s what I believe: the person who knows your field is worth more than the app that knows every field. |
| Keep a hand near the switch. |
| Gus Lehman |
| EDITOR, ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
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| SOURCES: IBTimes UK on the Chuzhou sesame loss (Aug 12) · Xataka México and Qué! (Aug 31 and Sep 3) · AI Incident Database report 7769, citing Litchi News · SoundHound AI Q3 release (Nov 5) and StockStory · People Matters and Recruiting News Network on SHL (Nov 2 and 4) · Tribune India/ANI on Avanade (Nov 3) · Damien Charlotin, AI Hallucination Cases database (Nov 5) · PR Hotels (Kelowna) Ltd. v Area 19, 2026 BCPAAB, via Courtready (Oct 15) · Nejadi c. Tribunal administratif du logement, 2026 QCCS 4181 (Oct 30) · LTO on BayVerfGH Vf. 9-VI-25 (Oct 22) · ITmedia AI+ on Pizza-La (Nov 6) · ifeng on Linfen (Aug 27) · Follow the Money and Lighthouse Reports on Rotterdam (Mar 6, 2023) · AlgorithmWatch on Poland (Apr 16, 2019) · Lead Stories · La República Verificador · Mala Espina · Correctiv · AAP FactCheck · El Sabueso/Grupo Animal · Creative Bloq · ITmedia · Sevilla Actualidad · Images: Lead Stories, La República, Mala Espina, Ibusuki Nanohana Marathon via ITmedia, Sevilla Actualidad |
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| ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
Sent every weekday morning.
Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own homework. |
