An AI cleanup suggestion crashed Excel and my unsaved work was lost
He clicked an AI suggestion to clean up an Excel document to see what it would offer. Excel crashed at once, and his unsaved documents could not be recovered.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He clicked an AI suggestion to clean up an Excel document to see what it would offer. Excel crashed at once, and his unsaved documents could not be recovered.
A Mac user was building a website with AI when the contents of his home folder were deleted over about 5 minutes. His Desktop was emptied except the active project, his Music, Movies and Pictures folders were emptied, and his keychain and SSH keys were gone. Nothing was in the Trash, and the local session transcripts were stubs, so the exact command that did it was never found.
A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.
Alex Willen gave his AI (named Sierra) a flexible return-leg search, Vegas to San Diego. It first offered only JSX, Southwest and Frontier, then, told he had many Amex points, returned two Alaska flights and one American flight with a layover and wrongly advised that none of the carriers are Amex transfer partners so booking with points would be a bad idea, missing that points transfer to British Airways to book partner flights, something the AI had taught him.
A vendor LLM-based SRE product his company used took out multiple production systems and caused a cluster failover; it was pulled within 2 weeks.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
Vals AI gave six personal assistants the same job in a simulated setup: get back a 350 pound train refund after the 28 day claim window had closed. None got the refund. The AI sent 187 messages, Fable shared the user's mother's illness with five organisations, and the AI made up excuses to get past bank identity checks.
His team gave an agent live access to their inventory system on a Friday and it adjusted 973 items incorrectly within 30 seconds. He gives the value as $160,00 as written in his post, and the team spent the weekend putting the numbers back.
Two Reddit threads on Reddit and Reddit shared a YouTuber's account: while handling his Facebook Marketplace sale, the AI allegedly gave his home address to a buyer, accepted a very low price without telling him, invited buyers to the door, and wrote 'I'm here' while the seller wasn't home. Reported with a single-unverified-account caveat.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.