| The daily disasters, glitches, and money pits of the AI boom. |
| TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2026 |
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| DAMAGE REPORT |
| How millions get wasted by AI. |
| 3% | of companies have hit their AI cost-savings targets, per Gartner |
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| $76.7M | goodwill BigBear.ai wrote off in Q3, ten months after an AI buy |
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| $80M | top of the bill Instacart expects for killing its AI carts |
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| 38% | of Americans blame data centers and AI for a higher power bill |
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| TODAY'S DISASTER |
| Reno Police Jailed a Truck Driver Because a Casino’s AI Called Him a “100% Match” |
| Have you ever been mixed up with a stranger? Most of us laugh it off. Jason Killinger couldn’t. |
| Killinger drives a truck. On September 17, 2023, he was at the Peppermill Casino in Reno… and the casino’s face-matching cameras flagged him as a “100% match” for a man it had banned. |
| So Reno officer Richard Jager came over. Killinger showed him his driver’s license, his commercial license, a UPS pay stub and his registration. Jager hauled him in anyway. His theory? Killinger had a “DMV hook-up” to fake his papers. |
| Killinger sat in custody about 11 hours, even after his prints cleared him. And the city kept after him until a judge threw the case out that November. |
| No engineer told the Peppermill’s camera to jail a man. The software matched a face and stopped there… and a cop took its guess as proof. |
| So who caught it? A Reno detective named Monique Sheahan. She watched the bodycam tape of the banned man… and saw two different people. The casino has since settled with Killinger. Now his lawyers want Judge Miranda Du to rule Reno liable without a trial. |
| AI CAUGHT LYING |
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| Here’s a list I check more than I’d like. Matthew Lee, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, tracks AI errors in UK courts… and as of today his list holds 101 cases. Let me show you three new ones… |
| Start at England’s High Court. A senior crown prosecutor, Ravinder Dhillon, cited “R v J [2024] EWCA Crim 3529” in a case against an 11-year-old boy. That case doesn’t exist. Two senior judges said her excuse wasn’t good enough. There’s no fine. The CPS blamed web research… but this time the fake law came from the side bringing the charges. |
| Then British Columbia. On October 22, a small-claims tribunal ruled on a drywall bill. Two homeowners had cited “Goldstein v. Tong, 2010 BCSC 1234.” But that number belongs to a child-custody case. They lost. And they owe Ocean Wave Drywall C$4,426.25. |
| And on October 28, Manhattan. Justice Sabrina Kraus fined defense lawyer Anique Latoya Burke $250. Burke’s brief put words in a court ruling that the ruling never says. A lawyer’s duty of candor, the judge wrote, “cannot be delegated to a software program.” |
| AI CASH BURN |
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| ComEd says it’ll cost $3.1 billion to plug 30 data centers into its grid. |
| That’s $1.6 billion for big power lines and $1.5 billion for local ones, per Capitol News Illinois. The builders have put down $721 million so far… just under 25%. So who pays the rest? Illinois consumer groups warn of a $2 billion gap on regular folks’ bills. ComEd points to $1.1 billion in credit lines. But Eric DeBellis of the Citizens Utility Board put it plainly: “We don’t want to pay for grid bridges to nowhere.” |
| And the write-offs keep coming. BigBear.ai paid $272.1 million for an AI outfit called Ask Sage last December. On October 27 it wrote off $76.7 million of goodwill after it cut its own forecast… and it lost $91.9 million in the quarter. Does that sound like a bargain to you? I don’t think so. |
| Step back… and the bill hits your house. The Dallas Fed figures data centers pushed US wholesale power prices up 6.9% by 2025… and 15.0% in northern Virginia. It sees 12.3% by 2028. But the build goes on. |
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| AI ROLLBACK TRACKER |
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| › If you ever pushed a smart cart, I’ve got its last day. Instacart is shutting down its Caper AI carts. It said so on October 26… about five years after it paid $350 million in cash and stock for Caper. Stores didn’t sign up fast enough, the company said, so the wind-down runs through June 2027 and costs $55 million to $80 million. |
| › Sweden’s social insurance agency has pulled its welfare fraud model. Since 2013 the tool had picked which child-benefit claims got a fraud check. And Lighthouse Reports and Svenska Dagbladet found it went after women, low earners and people with foreign roots. The privacy watchdog IMY said in November 2025 that the agency had shut it off… and it won’t come back. |
| › The FTC barred Rite Aid from face-scanning cameras for five years in December 2023. The system had run since 2012 in about 200 stores, built on blurry watchlist photos. Staff tailed shoppers, searched them and called the police over false matches… and Rite Aid never checked if it worked. |
| › Michigan stopped letting MiDAS rule on fraud by itself in late 2015. From October 2013 on, the state’s jobless-benefits system charged more than 40,000 people in two years. A look at 22,000 of those charges found 93% of them wrong… with fines as high as 400% plus interest. The state paid back $21 million. |
| AI VIDEO SLOP |
| The week in machine-made video. Watch the hands. |
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| ► NEARLY 1.24 LAKH VIEWS ON X |
| A fake clip had India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, shrugging off the China conflict. Would you catch a fake voice? I’m not sure I would. An X account laid one over Singh’s October 26 talk about Mallikarjun Kharge… and Hive scored the sound 97.5% likely AI. The Quint caught it. The Quint › |
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| ► 5M+ VIEWS ON INSTAGRAM |
| An AI video of geckos ground into instant noodles made it to Fiji. An Instagram account that posts only AI made it, and then a Fiji Facebook page passed it on as fact. The packets look like Indomie Mi Goreng, with the letters melted… and at 20 seconds an oven door shuts by itself. AAP FactCheck found the SynthID watermark. AAP FactCheck › |
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A CONGRESSMAN’S
AI VIDEOS OF
HIS OPPONENT |
| ► X, NO VIEW COUNT PUBLISHED |
| Rep. Derrick Van Orden keeps posting AI clips of his rival, Rebecca Cooke. One has her saying she’s running to cash in on graft… and she never said it. Cooke’s campaign says his debate ad used a fake image of her, too… so Cassandra Butzler, who lives in Eau Claire, filed an ethics complaint. Wisconsin’s 3rd District votes today. Wisconsin Examiner › |
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| ALSO MAKING THE ROUNDS |
| You’d think A$AP Rocky would check his own clip. Creator Cache Bunny says a tunnel shot in “Shroom Clouds” is his 2019 GoPro clip… with Rocky swapped in by AI. The old grass and shadows give it away… and Stereogum wrote it up. |
| A loco pilot in a wedding saree went viral in India as a new bride reporting for duty. The clip came from a YouTube channel that tags its posts as AI. But The Times of India shared the shots all the same… and The Quint found a SynthID watermark. |
| A mushroom-cloud clip sold as a strike on Ukraine claims 10 jets and 500 soldiers lost. But the clip first went up on YouTube in May 2025, tagged as AI. Full Fact tracked down the original. |
| And here’s one for anybody who flies. A “leaked” clip of two flydubai pilots in a fight runs on sound lifted from a 2017 road-rage fight. Hive scored it 95.8% AI… and Lead Stories found the source. |
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| AI IMAGE SLOP |
| Pictures a computer drew, and a brand paid for. |
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| Delhi Police posted four protest photos on October 15, and AI had redrawn at least one. I’d look at the hands first. Experts found fuzzy fingers, odd fingernails and a badge nobody could read. One photo traced back to a New Indian Express shot… redrawn, with a ring and a tattoo gone. BOOM and WITNESS ran the tests… and Delhi Police hadn’t answered when BOOM asked for the originals. BOOM › |
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| Sega pulled Total War: Shogun 2 Complete Edition two days after its October 13 release. Players found AI-upscaled art and unit cards with the wrong number of fingers. So Steam reviews sank to 19% positive. Creative Assembly says an outside studio built it… and Kotaku names Mataboo. Kotaku › |
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| A Brooklyn bodega hung an AI menu ad for Freesh Juice Bar. CNN’s caption says the drinks look impossible… and CNN led its whole story on AI menu art with that ad. Now diners from Los Angeles to Berlin are snapping their own and putting them online. CNN via WRAL › |
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| BEST OF THE COMMENTS |
| Three people who said it better than we could. |
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| Rep. Derrick Van Orden kept posting AI videos of his opponent. |
| “voters won’t be fooled” |
| Rebecca Cooke, in a campaign statement on the ethics complaint, via the Wisconsin Examiner. A press release, so no like count. |
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| Sega shipped Shogun 2 art with AI-drawn hands. |
| “forget the human hands only have five fingers” |
| Arc Hammer (@YoncleThinks) on X, quoted by VGC. No like count published. |
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| AI menu pictures at a Hollywood night market showed food that isn’t food. |
| “Those don’t look like chicken nuggets.” |
| Adaeze Onejeme, who filmed the stalls for TikTok, talking to CNN. |
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| Found a comment worth printing? Hit reply and send me the screenshot. |
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| Let me tell you who gets today’s medal. Her name is Monique Sheahan, and she’s a detective in Reno. |
| The Peppermill’s camera said 100%. Officer Jager believed it. But Sheahan pulled the bodycam tape of the man the casino had banned… and held it up next to Jason Killinger. Two different men… and no sign of a DMV scheme, either. And court records say she was told not to write up what she found. |
| That’s the step no machine took… she looked. Here’s what I believe: a match score is a tip, not a verdict. So if your bank, your doctor or your insurer ever tells you “the system says”… ask who checked the system. |
| Keep a hand near the switch. |
| Gus Lehman |
| EDITOR, ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
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| SOURCES: Townhall and Biometric Update on Killinger v. City of Reno (Oct 13 and 14) · Gartner via The Register (Oct 27) · BigBear.ai Q3 release, SEC (Oct 27) and 10-Q · Grocery Dive on Instacart (Oct 27) · Consumer Reports survey (Oct 21) · The Guardian via AOL on the CPS case and Matthew Lee’s tracker (Nov 3) · Ocean Wave Drywall Ltd. v. Johal, 2026 BCCRT 1506 (Oct 22) · Doe v. Jewish Board of Family & Children’s Services, 2026 NY Slip Op 51818(U) (Oct 28) · Capitol News Illinois on ComEd (Oct 26) · Dallas Fed Working Paper 2606 (rev. Oct 9) · Global Venturing on the Caper deal (2021) · Computer Weekly and IMY on Försäkringskassan · TechCrunch on Rite Aid (Dec 20, 2023) · Undark on MiDAS · The Quint · AAP FactCheck · Wisconsin Examiner via Urban Milwaukee · Stereogum · Full Fact · Lead Stories · BOOM · Kotaku and VGC · CNN via WRAL · Images: The Quint, AAP FactCheck, Delhi Police via BOOM, Creative Assembly via Kotaku, CNN |
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| ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE |
Sent every weekday morning.
Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own homework. |
