| The daily disasters, glitches, and money pits of the AI boom. |
| FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2026 |
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| DAMAGE REPORT |
| How millions get wasted by AI. |
| -$2.12B | Meta’s free cash flow last quarter, by its own count |
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| $6.3B | extra charges data centers will add to PJM power bills in 2028 and 2029 |
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| 84% | of big-company tech chiefs who say old systems sank an AI project |
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| $104,110 | in costs and fines across 27 Canadian fake-citation orders |
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| TODAY'S DISASTER |
| OFF Radio Kraków Handed Its Microphones to AI. Listeners Took Them Back in Seven Days. |
| Do you keep a radio on in the kitchen? I do. I know every voice on it by name. |
| So did the listeners of OFF Radio Kraków, a small channel of Poland’s public Radio Kraków. About a dozen of its outside hosts lost their slots at the end of August 2024. On October 22 the channel came back with three AI hosts… Emi, Kuba and Alex. |
| Here’s what Emi did on day one. She “interviewed” Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel poet who died in 2012… and the fake Szymborska chatted about the prose of Han Kang. Han Kang won her Nobel twelve years later. |
| Polish writer Remigiusz Grzela told German radio the machine missed Szymborska’s irony completely. No engineer can program a sense of bad taste. |
| So who caught it? Mateusz Demski, a film critic and journalist who’d hosted his own show there. He called the swap “a dangerous precedent that hits us all.” So he started a petition… and more than 23,000 people signed. On October 24 he carried 17,500 of those names to the Culture Ministry. |
| The station had planned three months of AI… it quit after seven days. |
| AI CAUGHT LYING |
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| I check one list before I write this section. Damien Charlotin counts every court case where a machine made up the law… and he’s at 2,202. Let me show you three. |
| Start in the Canary Islands. In July, the criminal chamber of the islands’ High Court fined a lawyer €840 over one appeal. The appeal cited at least 25 rulings. None of them exist. The lawyer wouldn’t admit it. So the court sent the whole file to the bar association in Lanzarote to look at discipline. And that was the second time this year the islands’ top court caught a lawyer at it. In February the same chamber fined another lawyer €420 over 48 fake citations… half what a year of legal AI software costs. |
| Then Canada. On September 28, Justice Roger Lafrenière of the Federal Court found five made-up cases in an immigration filing by lawyer Washim Amed. In his ruling he called fake citations an abuse of process, the same as making a false statement to the court. The bill? Zero. The government lawyers never asked for costs, so nobody pays a cent. |
| And on Wednesday, Florida. The Fourth District Court of Appeal called lawyer Jaclyn Soroka’s filings “AI slop”… and referred her to the Florida Bar. Her 33-page motion to remove the trial judge quoted words from an earlier appeals ruling that the ruling doesn’t contain. She blamed a tight deadline. But a referral isn’t a finding… and there’s no fine yet. |
| AI CASH BURN |
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| Meta’s free cash flow came in at negative $2.12 billion last quarter. |
| That’s straight from the earnings release Meta put out on Tuesday afternoon. The business brought in $32.79 billion in operating cash… and capital spending, leases included, ran $34.91 billion. And long-term debt climbed to $80.922 billion, from $58.744 billion at New Year’s. |
| Meta now has 66,775 employees, 15% fewer than a year ago… but it still plans $135 billion to $145 billion in capital spending this year. Would you keep writing checks bigger than your paycheck? I wouldn’t. |
| Step back and look at your electric bill. This month Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal put out a report on data centers… and you’re in it. Data center demand will add $6.3 billion in charges for PJM grid customers in 2028 and 2029, the report says. Maryland customers alone will pay $1.6 billion for new transmission lines over the next ten years. So check that line on your next bill. |
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| AI ROLLBACK TRACKER |
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| › Six Canadian outlets pulled every column by “Daniel Robson” by September 30. The Ottawa Citizen ran his headshot and writing through analysis tools… and both came back as AI. No editor at any of the six could confirm who he was. Ilker Sezer, an editor at Türkiye Today, got a pitch from him about a drug ring… and offered him a video call. He refused. |
| › Google stopped paying for product bug reports in open-source code on October 1. Its bounty had paid up to $7,500 a flaw in flagship projects like Go and Angular, and up to $3,133.70 in smaller ones. But a flood of automated reports came in, “the vast majority of which are not valid,” Google said. Google calls the pause temporary and promises a new plan by the end of March 2027. |
| › Cloppenburg, a German town, switched off its AI phone assistant KIRa in May. Have you ever called city hall and got sent to the wrong desk? KIRa did that around the clock. It had picked up calls for the citizens’ office and registry office since October 2025, answering questions about ID cards, weddings and certificates. But too often it sent callers to the wrong web page… or the wrong clerk. After about seven months, the town gave up. |
| › The National Eating Disorders Association took down its Tessa chatbot in 2023. NEDA had closed its human helpline, which ran for more than 20 years, that May, after about 70,000 contacts the year before. Then Sharon Maxwell, a consultant who works in the eating disorder field, asked Tessa about healthy eating. It told her she could lose one to two pounds a week and eat no more than 2,000 calories a day. So she posted screenshots… and Tessa came down within hours. |
| AI VIDEO SLOP |
| The week in machine-made video. Watch the hands. |
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| ► COUNCIL SOCIAL MEDIA, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| Limerick City and County Council made its Christmas 2026 promo video with AI and posted it last weekend. Why? Director Sean Lenihan said the council doesn’t have that kind of footage yet… it’ll have its own next year. At Monday’s meeting, councillors from more than one party called the video amateurish and misleading. And the council switched off the comments. Limerick Post › |
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| ► X, OCT 19, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| Fake videos put the Pink Panther in this month’s Paris protests. An account on X posted one on October 19 and said the Panther stole the show. In another, the Panther fights riot police. His weapon? A baguette. If you watch the bread… you’ll see it never breaks. Lead Stories ran the clips through three AI checkers and traced the stills to older protest photos. Lead Stories › |
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INDONESIA
AI SOLDIERS
ON THE MARCH |
| ► TIKTOK, OCT 12, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| An AI video showed soldiers marching on Indonesia’s parliament. TikTok posts said tens of thousands of retired troops wanted Vice President Gibran Rakabuming impeached, days after a court ruling went his way. But look closely… the banner text runs together, and many faces blur. AFP Fact Check found Google’s SynthID watermark in the clip, and the same video had already gone around in 2025. AFP › |
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| ALSO MAKING THE ROUNDS |
| Nura Studios fed Amanita Design’s 2009 game Machinarium to AI and called the result a love letter. Amanita called it disgusting. So CEO Sylvio Drouin said sorry on X and deleted the posts. |
| A Tesla Roadster flying off a city rooftop went up on X on October 20, with a caption calling it another insane test. Tesla’s prototype flew in Texas five days earlier… nowhere near a tall building. Hive scored the clip 100% likely AI… and Sightengine said 99%. |
| Houses on hydraulic stilts keep rising above floodwater in clips on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Lead Stories warned on October 22 that many of the clips are AI… and not one caption names a company that builds the lifts. |
| And here’s a twist. Fans saw one short animated bit in Olivia Rodrigo’s “Expectations” video and decided it was AI. Designer Jack Harrison’s team made it in 2D and 3D software… played it on an old Windows Vista PC and filmed the screen. People did the work… and still got blamed. |
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| AI IMAGE SLOP |
| Pictures a computer drew, and a brand paid for. |
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| A franchised Old Spaghetti House at Robinsons Place Antipolo, in the Philippines, hung a poster of AI food. Five dishes… every one drawn by a machine. Would you order from it? Threads users called the pictures unappetizing. So co-founder Lizzie Guerrero apologized… and the poster came down. Radar › |
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| The “Don’t Rank Julia” PAC posted an AI-edited photo of Oregon county commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. Look at the leaves behind her. They went from green to brown. And the file says “made with Google AI.” So Bobbie Regan, a Portland political consultant, filed a complaint with the state on Monday. OPB › |
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| Reform UK’s Herne Bay and Sandwich branch posted an AI before-and-after of a clean-up in Sarre, Kent. The fence gained a slat. And a car in the background never budged. Mike Sole, who leads the Liberal Democrats on Canterbury City Council, spotted it… and the branch apologized for an administrative oversight. The New World › |
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| BEST OF THE COMMENTS |
| Three people who said it better than we could. |
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| Limerick’s council made its Christmas promo with AI, then switched off the comments. |
| “the Limerick version of The Polar Express” |
| Cllr Sarah Kiely of Fine Gael, at Monday’s council meeting, as the Limerick Post reported. Said in the room, so no like count. |
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| Nura Studios fed Machinarium to AI and called it a love letter. |
| “Love letters are supposed to be handwritten.” |
| Amanita Design, the studio that made the game, on X. PC Gamer printed it. No like count published. |
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| Reform UK’s local branch posted an AI clean-up picture with an extra fence slat. |
| “a lesson in how not to use AI.” |
| Mike Sole, Liberal Democrat leader on Canterbury City Council, to The New World. No like count published. |
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| Found a comment worth printing? Hit reply and send me the screenshot. |
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| Let me turn over one number from today: seven. |
| That’s how many days OFF Radio Kraków kept its AI hosts on the air in October 2024. The station had planned on three months. Emi could read a script and fake a dead poet’s voice… but she couldn’t tell that nobody wanted to hear it. |
| Mateusz Demski could. And 23,000 people agreed with him. Here’s what I believe: a voice on the radio is worth trusting because a person stands behind it. Did your station swap one out? Write them a letter. It worked in Kraków. |
| Keep a hand near the switch. |
| Gus Lehman |
| EDITOR, ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
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| SOURCES: Notes from Poland (Oct 22, 2024), OKO.press (Oct 28, 2024), AP via ABC News, heise and Spider’s Web on OFF Radio Kraków · Meta Q3 2026 results release (Oct 21) · Warren, Van Hollen and Blumenthal, Power and Profits report (Oct 2026) · GFT Technologies and Wakefield Research via Business Wire (Sep 29) · Courtready Canadian AI Hallucination Cases Database (Oct 22) · Damien Charlotin, AI Hallucination Cases database (updated Oct 19) · elDiario.es on the Canary Islands fine (Jul 29) and Poder Judicial on the February fine · Federal Court of Canada, Ahmed v. Canada, 2026 FC 1202 · JD Journal on Lisandrillo v. Palozzi (Oct 22) · The Hub, Policy Options and CBC on Daniel Robson (Sep 24 to 30) · The Hacker News on Google OSS VRP (Oct 6) · nordnews on Cloppenburg (May 19) · KAXE/NPR on NEDA (Jun 8, 2023) · Limerick Post · Lead Stories · AFP Fact Check via Yahoo · PC Gamer · Creative Bloq · Radar · OPB · The New World · Images: Limerick City and County Council via Limerick Post, Lead Stories, Radar (Google Maps, @cgsflorido on Threads), Don’t Rank Julia via OPB, Herne Bay and Sandwich Reform UK via The New World |
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| ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
Sent every weekday morning.
Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own homework. |
