What’s of interest? AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions
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Named after Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts. Well, guess what? Humans have evolved! We’re now so advanced that we’ve outsourced our poor decision-making to machines.
The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilisation—and thought, “You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!” These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn’t just for biology anymore; it’s gone digital, and it’s coming for our entire species.
Because why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?
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The AI Darwin Awards 2025 is such a witty and creative idea! A great reminder that while AI has huge potential, we need responsibility and safety checks to avoid turning small mistakes into big global risks.
I agree Wisal that the AI Darwin Awards are fun, but its also series and well assembled.
First of all, anyone can enter a nomination where there are criteria, categories and specifics required. It’s not a closed group activity.
Also, the current nominees are rated/reviewed, they are first “unverified” until a reliable source is added to change it to “verified” Some are listed “ineligible” for reasons stated.
Yes it’s done with humor, but can possibly be used as a model for teaching about being critical of AI claims. If I was teaching media literacy, I might even consider an assignment for learners to research and submit a nomination.
Thanks a lot, Alan.
I really appreciate the clarification , I see now that the AI Darwin Awards are both fun and serious, and the process is open and well-structured. I also like the idea of using it as a teaching model for media literacy. Your example about the “AI journalism” case with the Sun Times made it very clear.
I agree, turning this into an assignment for learners to investigate and nominate could be a great way to build critical thinking about AI.
And haha, no problem about the emails — I’ll keep an eye on the site! Thanks again for the thoughtful explanation.
This post is so joyous