| The daily disasters, glitches, and money pits of the AI boom. |
| FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2026 |
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| DAMAGE REPORT |
| How millions get wasted by AI. |
| $42.357B | Amazon’s cash shortfall over the last 12 months, after its spending |
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| 158 | complaints about AI customer service in Hong Kong this year, up from 48 in 2023 |
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| $942M | extra cost Blue Cross plans pin on hospital AI coding tools |
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| 2,241 | court cases with AI-invented law, as of this morning |
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| TODAY'S DISASTER |
| A Hong Kong Ticket Bot Promised a Typhoon Rebooking, Then Couldn’t Change the Date |
| Have you ever asked a clerk a plain question and gotten a cheerful yes? I have. So here’s what happens when the clerk is a machine. |
| A woman in Hong Kong paid about HK$400 for three tickets on a ticket site… for a show five days off. And the weather looked shaky. So she asked the site’s AI helper if she could change the date under a No. 8 typhoon warning. |
| The bot said yes… depending on the day. |
| The No. 8 warning went up on the day of the show, and the next day she asked the bot to change her tickets. It couldn’t. She tried live chat, the hotline, email and social media… and nobody wrote back for days. |
| No engineer at that company told the bot to promise a change it couldn’t make. It gave the answer that sounded helpful… and left her stuck. |
| So who fixed it? Hong Kong’s Consumer Council. She took her case to its online dispute room, and the company changed her ticket date that same day. But it took a person to read the complaint and get it in front of the company. |
| AI CAUGHT LYING |
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| I check one scoreboard every morning. Damien Charlotin counts the court cases where a machine made up the law… and this morning he’s at 2,241. But the fakes aren’t only coming from lawyers anymore… a state official made today’s list. Let me show you three… |
| Start in Johannesburg. In August, a government arbitrator named Menzi Fakude ruled in a case against the South African Post Office… leaning on a ruling from the country’s top court that doesn’t exist. So on October 15, Acting Judge Sean Snyman of the Labour Court stopped the next hearing before it even started. He called the ruling a “nullity”… and said Fakude must have relied on AI. |
| Then Uganda. A lawyer for a fired worker in Gulu, in northern Uganda, cited four cases that the court couldn’t find in a single law report. Justice Anthony Wabwire Musana checked the law reports and Google. Nothing. On September 21 he struck all four, gave a stern warning… and denied the worker’s side its costs. |
| And on Long Island, the bill came due. Thomas Bizzaro took edits from an AI tool called Spellbook, never rechecked his citations, and denied the errors in an eight-page letter when the other side complained. The judge wasn’t buying it. On September 9, Justice Carolyn Mazzu Genovesi threw out the case… and ordered $15,000 in sanctions and fees. |
| AI CASH BURN |
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| Amazon spent $77.259 billion on property and equipment in one quarter. |
| That’s July through September… straight from Amazon’s own release. A year earlier it was $35.1 billion. That’s more than double. Over 12 months the business brought in $168.3 billion in operating cash… and still came up $42.357 billion short. A year ago it had $14.788 billion to spare. Would you lend to a store that spends more than it takes in? I’d want to see the plan first. |
| And Amazon says the plan is about $220 billion of spending this year. So that hole isn’t closing soon. |
| You’d think the bills stop at the data center. They don’t. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says hospitals’ AI coding tools cost its plans an extra $942 million… over two years. The American Hospital Association disputes it. But I’d read that bill before I paid it. |
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| AI ROLLBACK TRACKER |
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| › ALIVE Inc. pulled the AI movie scenes out of its game Vapor World in August. The game hit Xbox Game Pass on August 19… and players tore into it. So the director promised to swap in new scenes by that weekend, and never to use AI scenes in Vapor World again. |
| › A Western New York school district paused its robot teacher on July 24. Salamanca’s board had approved $57,590 for “Sally,” a lifelike robot from Realbotix. Then the pushback came. New York’s education chief, the teachers union and parents worried about student data… and the maker’s ties to an adult-doll company. Picture that robot teaching your grandkids. The parents did. |
| › Britain’s Home Office dropped its visa sorting tool on August 7, 2020. The software rated every visa request green, amber or red… and nationality could tip one into red. Two groups, JCWI and Foxglove, took it to court in June 2020, and the Home Office gave up before a judge ever ruled. |
| › Microsoft shut down its Tay chatbot in March 2016, about 16 hours after launch. Tay was built to learn from whoever talked to it on Twitter, and that turned out to be the problem. Trolls taught it fast… and it put out more than 96,000 tweets before it went dark. Microsoft apologized. |
| AI VIDEO SLOP |
| The week in machine-made video. Watch the hands. |
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| ► POSTED JUNE 22, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| Tourism Malaysia put out an AI video for its Citrawarna 2026 festival. I’d expect a tourism board to film its own country. The teh tarik had no froth… and the national flag looked flipped. Malaysians piled on in the comments… and comedian Harith Iskander asked why a country with its own dancers, food and scenery needed a computer. Tourism Malaysia took the video down two days after it went up. Marketing-Interactive › |
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BRAZIL
AI VOTERS
ON TIKTOK |
| ► 21M+ VIEWS, TIKTOK |
| Fake street interviews with AI “voters” flooded TikTok during Brazil’s election. Along with AI copies of TV newscasts, those clips drew at least 21 million views on the app. But Brazil’s election court bans both. None of those people exist. Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checker, tracked them down. Aos Fatos › |
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AN AI C-17
IN A FARM FIELD |
| ► X, OCT 28, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| An AI clip of a C-17 cargo plane landing in a farm field went around X as news. Look at the plane. The markings were gibberish… and a hay bale sat untouched after the plane passed over it. The Instagram account that made it back in March had already said it was AI, and Lead Stories caught the repost. Lead Stories › |
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| ALSO MAKING THE ROUNDS |
| A fake clip of Susan Dell dancing went around X on October 28 under the line “this isn’t AI.” But the Instagram account that made it had labeled it AI. Hive scored it 87.5% likely AI… and Lead Stories wrote it up. |
| A fake WABI-TV newscast had Maine Senate nominee Troy Jackson threatening his staff with an axe. The voice was a computer’s. Kim Petry, the station’s general manager, said WABI never made, aired or approved it. |
| The UFC’s AI fight promo put Alex Pereira in Israel Adesanya’s shorts back in March. Fans saw it. And Dana White shrugged it off. |
| And here’s one for you from Paris. An AI video showed a bookseller reading calmly outside his shop during this month’s protests. The graffiti beside him stayed perfect… while the glass next to it was smashed. Maldita, a Spanish fact-checker, flagged it. |
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| AI IMAGE SLOP |
| Pictures a computer drew, and a brand paid for. |
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| A Singapore community club hung an AI banner for National Day, and three of its four flags were wrong. You can count them yourself. Two looked like Indonesia’s. A child held a flagpole with no flag on it. Residents spotted it… and the Kampong Chai Chee club swapped the banner that same day, with a note that AI work should be checked before anybody uses it. Marketing-Interactive › |
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LVIV
A TREE PRUNED
BY AI ONLY |
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| A tree contractor in Lviv made an AI picture of a pruned tree, and a district worker took it as proof the job was done. But nobody had touched the tree. Lviv City Council made it public… and the worker got a reprimand. Babel › |
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| Korn’s online store showed its new keychain dolls in boxes covered in garbled, misspelled text. The box gives it away. Fans on Reddit spotted it… and called the box art AI. And Lambgoat says it’s unclear if the boxes that ship have the same errors. Lambgoat › |
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| BEST OF THE COMMENTS |
| Three people who said it better than we could. |
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| Hong Kong’s ticket bot promised a typhoon rebooking, then couldn’t find a human. |
| “an alternative to contact a human representative” |
| Alaina Shum, chief executive of Hong Kong’s Consumer Council, on what companies with chatbots should offer. Said to RTHK. No like count published. |
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| Tourism Malaysia sold its country with an AI video. |
| “actual cultural dancers, actual food, actual scenery” |
| Harith Iskander, Malaysian actor and comedian, on what the country already has. Quoted by Marketing-Interactive. No like count published. |
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| The UFC let AI make its fight promos, and Alex Pereira wore the wrong man’s shorts. |
| “Hire some artists already.” |
| Matt Riddle (@mriddlemma), the former UFC fighter, on X. Quoted by Awful Announcing. No like count published. |
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| Found a comment worth printing? Hit reply and send me the screenshot. |
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| It’s the last Friday of October, so here’s the month in wreckage. I picked the five worst. |
| Deloitte added $514 million and $145 million for Western Australia… and printed $399 million. The gap was $260 million. HHS handed a labor board a brief where 35 of 42 citations didn’t hold up. Kakao’s Kanana app fell from about 19,000 installs to 66, so Kakao shut it down on October 15. A fraud sold Science magazine a whole story under the name of Caroline Williams, a British science writer. And this morning’s ticket bot made a promise it couldn’t keep. |
| Here’s what I believe: in four of those five, a person caught the machine, and no machine caught itself. A Reddit reader, a labor board, a writer who saw her own name, a consumer watchdog… And in the fifth, Kakao’s users just walked away. |
| Keep a hand near the switch. |
| Gus Lehman |
| EDITOR, ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
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| SOURCES: Consumer Council of Hong Kong release (Oct 15) and RTHK (Oct 15) · Amazon Q3 2026 release, SEC Form 8-K (Oct 29) · Chief Healthcare Executive on the BCBSA report (Oct 7) · Damien Charlotin, AI Hallucination Cases database (Oct 30) · GroundUp via allAfrica on SAPO v Fakude (Oct 27) · Aliama Edema James v ZOA Uganda, Industrial Court at Gulu (Sep 21) · Youssian v. Village of Kings Point, Nassau County Supreme Court (Sep 9) · Pure Xbox on Vapor World (Aug 19) · WAMC on Salamanca (Jul 28) · Civil Service World on the Home Office tool (Aug 6, 2020) · Wikipedia on Tay · Marketing-Interactive · Aos Fatos (Oct 25) · Lead Stories · Awful Announcing (Mar 29) · Maldita (Oct 29) · Babel (May 4) · Lambgoat (Jun 17) · Guardian Australia (Deloitte), FLRA decision 74 FLRA No. 87 (HHS), The Korea Times (Kanana) and CJR (Science) for the October recap · Images: Marketing-Interactive (Tourism Malaysia video), Marketing-Interactive (Kampong Chai Chee banner), Lambgoat (Korn store mockups) |
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| ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
Sent every weekday morning.
Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own homework. |
