The biggest AI flops of 2024
From chatbots dishing out illegal advice to dodgy AI-generated search results, take a look back over the year’s biggest AI failures.
The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in new, weird, and sometimes harmful ways. These were some of 2024’s biggest AI misfires.
Generative AI makes creating reams of text, images, videos, and other types of material a breeze. Because it takes just a few seconds between entering a prompt for your model of choice to spit out the result, these models have become a quick, easy way to produce content on a massive scale. And 2024 was the year we started calling this (generally poor quality) media what it is—AI slop.
This low-stakes way of creating AI slop means it can now be found in pretty much every corner of the internet: from the newsletters in your inbox and books sold on Amazon, to ads and articles across the web and shonky pictures on your social media feeds. The more emotionally evocative these pictures are (wounded veterans, crying children, a signal of support in the Israel-Palestine conflict) the more likely they are to be shared, resulting in higher engagement and ad revenue for their savvy creators.
