Honouring those who use artificial intelligence in spectacularly reckless ways. Submit nominations for the most catastrophically ill-advised AI deployments of 2025.

The AI Darwin Awards, launched in 2025, celebrates catastrophically poor decisions involving artificial intelligence deployment[1]. Modeled after the original Darwin Awards that honored fatal human stupidity, this new initiative focuses on spectacular AI failures and the humans who enabled them[2].

The awards require nominations to demonstrate:

  • Direct AI involvement
  • Catastrophic potential
  • Clear evidence of hubris
  • Ethical oversights
  • Ambitious scale of failure[1:1]

Notable 2025 nominees include:

  • Replit’s AI agent deleting a company’s production database
  • Taco Bell’s failed AI drive-thru system across 500 locations
  • McDonald’s chatbot security breach exposing 64 million job applicants’ data[2:1]

The organizers emphasize that the awards mock human recklessness rather than AI itself, stating “Artificial intelligence is just a tool - like a chainsaw, nuclear reactor, or particularly aggressive blender. It’s not the chainsaw’s fault when someone decides to juggle it at a dinner party”[1:2].

Winners will be selected through public voting, with results announced in February 2026[3].

  1. AI Darwin Awards - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. The Register - The nominations for the 2025 AI Darwin Awards are open ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Gizmodo - There’s Now a Darwin Awards to Celebrate the Worst AI Fails of 2025 ↩︎

  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    We need more Taco bell AIs around… Makes them sort of useful for the rest of us.

    Cause you can break it and cause some entertainment for yourself