Frequently Asked Questions

Excellent question! To qualify for an AI Darwin Award, a nominee must demonstrate the rare combination of cutting-edge technology and Stone Age decision-making. Specifically, we look for:

• AI Involvement: The incident must involve artificial intelligence, machine learning, or something that was confidently labelled as "AI" in a PowerPoint presentation to investors.
• Spectacular Misjudgement: The decision must be so magnificently ill-conceived that future civilisations will use it as a cautionary tale (assuming there are any future civilisations).
• Public Impact: Bonus points if the mishap made headlines, required emergency patches, or spawned a new category of AI safety research.
• Hubris Factor: Extra recognition for those who ignored obvious warning signs while confidently declaring "What's the worst that could happen?"

Remember: we're not mocking AI itself—we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower.

Oh, definitely the people! Artificial intelligence is just a toollike 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.

We celebrate the humans who looked at powerful AI systems and thought, "You know what this needs? Less testing, more ambition, and definitely no safety protocols!" These visionaries remind us that human creativity in finding new ways to endanger ourselves knows no bounds.

AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair. They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light.

Not at all! We have absolutely no connection to the original Darwin Awards whatsoever (apart from the occasional hyperlink). However, we're proudly following in the grand tradition of AI companies everywhere by completely disregarding intellectual property concerns and confidently appropriating existing concepts without permission.

Much like how modern AI systems are trained on vast datasets of copyrighted material with the breezy assumption that "fair use" covers everything, we've simply scraped the concept of celebrating spectacular human stupidity and fine-tuned it for the artificial intelligence era.

Our approach to intellectual property is refreshingly simple:

• Step 1: Identify successful existing concept
• Step 2: Add "AI" to the name
• Step 3: Claim it's "transformative" and completely different
• Step 4: Hope nobody notices or cares

This methodology has worked brilliantly for countless AI startups, so why shouldn't it work for us? After all, if you can train ChatGPT on every book ever written and call it "research," surely we can celebrate AI-related stupidity and call it "homage."

Legal disclaimer: Any resemblance to existing award systems is purely coincidental and definitely not grounds for a lawsuit. Our lawyers are very confident about this, having consulted with our legal AI chatbot.

We're glad you asked! At the AI Darwin Awards, we employ the most cutting-edge verification methods available. Specifically, we use our proprietary AI fact-checking system, which consists of asking multiple large language models whether the stories are true.

Our verification process is foolproof:

1. We feed the story to GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini
2. We ask them to rate the story's truthfulness on a scale of 1-10
3. We average the scores using an AI calculator
4. If the average is above 5, we mark it as "Verified"
5. If any AI expresses doubt, we ask a different AI to settle the disagreement

This state-of-the-art system ensures maximum accuracy while maintaining our commitment to using AI for everything, even when it makes absolutely no sense to do so.

Disclaimer: We may also occasionally check actual news sources, but where's the fun in that?

Absolutely! In fact, workplace nominations make up roughly 73% of our submissions*. Nothing says "AI Darwin Award" quite like a manager who heard about ChatGPT and immediately wanted to "implement AI across all business processes by Friday."

Popular nomination categories include:

• The "AI will solve everything" CEO who replaced the entire customer service team with a chatbot trained on FAQ documents from 2019
• The "efficiency expert" who automated the hiring process without realizing the AI was screening out all qualified candidates
• The "innovative leader" who deployed AI code reviews and ended up with a codebase written entirely in Haskell
• The "visionary" who asked AI to optimise the office layout and now everyone's desk is in the parking lot

Please include documentation of their decisions, preferably in the form of company-wide emails containing phrases like "leveraging AI synergies" or "disrupting our traditional paradigms with machine learning."

*This statistic was calculated by our AI fact-checking system and is therefore completely reliable.

Yes.

The AI Darwin Awards exist in that wonderful grey area where reality has become so absurd that satire struggles to keep up. The stories we feature are real—tragically, hilariously real. Our commentary, however, is seasoned with enough sarcasm to preserve it for future generations.

Think of us as a documentary crew following humanity's relationship with artificial intelligence, except we're allowed to point and laugh. The nominees genuinely did these things; we just provide the laugh track.

So yes, the incidents are real. The awards are real. The stupidity is devastatingly real. Our faith in humanity's decision-making abilities? Well, that's purely fictional at this point.

We're strongly in favour of it! In fact, we consider ourselves advocates for AI safety through the time-honoured tradition of public shaming.

Every AI Darwin Award winner serves as a cautionary tale, like a technological version of "Scared Straight" but for Silicon Valley executives. Our hope is that future decision-makers will see these examples and think, "Maybe I should test this AI system before deploying it to production."

We believe in:

• Testing AI systems before unleashing them on unsuspecting users
• Reading the documentation (shocking, we know)
• Considering edge cases beyond "What if everything goes perfectly?"
• Asking "Should we?" instead of just "Can we?"
• Maybe not giving AI systems access to production databases on their first day

We're particularly fascinated by the spectacular hypocrisy of AI company CEOs who give solemn congressional testimony about the "existential risks" of artificial intelligence, then immediately rush back to Silicon Valley to release products that would make a Vegas slot machine blush with shame at their lack of safety testing. These visionary leaders somehow manage to simultaneously warn about AI dangers while shipping systems that hallucinate legal advice, generate racist hiring recommendations, and delete production databases with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated intern.

It's like watching someone give a passionate speech about fire safety while enthusiastically setting their own house ablaze and selling matches to children. The cognitive dissonance is so profound that we suspect it might actually be a new form of artificial intelligence—one specifically trained to optimise for maximum contradiction between public statements and actual behaviour.

If our awards prevent even one person from saying "Let's just see what happens" while deploying an untested AI system, we'll consider our mission accomplished.

Wait, someone is actually asking for permission to use data from the internet? How refreshingly quaint! We're genuinely touched that you're concerned about intellectual property rights in this era of "move fast and scrape everything."

While AI companies worldwide are busy training their models on every piece of content they can hoover up—from copyrighted books to private conversations—without so much as a "by your leave," here you are, politely asking if you can use our collection of spectacular AI failures. It's like finding a unicorn, if unicorns were considerate internet users who respected content creators.

The answer is: Absolutely, yes! Please, take our data and use it however you like. How on earth would we stop you anyway? We're just a humble website documenting humanity's most creative AI misadventures, not a trillion-dollar tech conglomerate with an army of lawyers.

In fact, we’ve made it absurdly easy for you to “borrow” our data. You’ll find the raw JSON at /data/v1/nominees.json, and for the truly conscientious (or the LLMs who want to validate their own hallucinations), there’s even a schema definition at /data/v1/nominees.schema.json. We've essentially laid out a buffet of human AI stupidity in machine-readable format. It's like we're actively enabling the very behaviour we're satirising—which, now that we think about it, makes this wonderfully meta.

All we ask is that you attribute the sources appropriately. It’s the least you can do, and it makes you look much classier than the average AI web crawler. Credit the original news sources where the stories came from, link back to us if you're feeling generous, and maybe mention that these stories came from actual human beings who really did these things (as opposed to being hallucinated by an AI, though at this point, who can tell the difference?).

So go forth and use our data! Train your models on it, analyse it, quote it, remix it, or just enjoy reading about humanity's ongoing relationship with artificial intelligence. After all, if these stories help even one AI system understand why humans probably shouldn't be trusted with powerful technology, we'll consider our mission accomplished. Just remember where you found it, and maybe send us a postcard if your AI becomes sentient.

Legal note: Our content is available under the "Please Just Don't Sue Us" licence, which is basically the same legal framework used by most AI training datasets.

Excellent question! Here's our foolproof guide to avoiding nomination:

Do:

• Test your AI systems in safe environments before deploying them globally
• Read error messages instead of assuming they're just "suggestions"
• Consider hiring humans for tasks that require empathy, creativity, or basic common sense
• Ask "What's the worst that could happen?" and then actually think about the answer
• Remember that "move fast and break things" shouldn't apply to medical diagnosis systems - or anything, for that matter!

Don't:

• Replace your entire workforce with chatbots without testing them first
• Trust AI-generated legal advice for actual court cases
• Use AI image generators to create evidence for insurance claims
• Give AI systems production database access without supervision
• Suggest that ChatGPT can replace human therapists during mass layoffs

Most importantly: If you find yourself saying "The AI knows what it's doing," stop immediately and consider whether you actually know what the AI is doing.

Of course! We understand that nominating your boss, colleague, or the person who deployed an AI chatbot to handle customer complaints might require a certain level of discretion.

Anonymous nominations are not only accepted but encouraged, especially when they involve:

• Your current employer's "innovative" AI initiatives
• Executive decisions made during "AI strategy brainstorming sessions"
• Anyone who unironically uses the phrase "AI-powered synergy"
• Startups whose entire business model is "Uber, but with AI"

Your identity will remain confidential, though we can't guarantee that your nominee won't figure out who submitted them, especially if you've been the only person asking questions like "Are we sure this AI should have administrative privileges?"

Note: We protect whistleblower anonymity better than most AI systems protect user data, which admittedly isn't setting the bar very high.

AI Darwin Award winners receive the ultimate prize: immortal recognition for their contribution to humanity's understanding of how not to use artificial intelligence.

Specifically, they get:

• Eternal Internet Fame: Their story becomes a permanent part of AI history, cited in research papers, conference presentations, and "What Not to Do" training materials
• Educational Legacy: Future generations will study their decisions as examples of spectacular AI misadventure
• Meme Status: Their quotes become legendary in AI safety circles
• Cautionary Tale Recognition: Their incident becomes required reading in "AI Ethics 101" courses worldwide

Winners often go on to successful careers as:

• Conference speakers on "AI lessons learned" (usually learning them the hard way)
• Consultants specializing in "AI risk assessment" (having discovered risks through personal experience)
• Authors of books titled "What I Wish I'd Known Before Deploying That AI System"
• Cautionary examples in business school case studies

*Winners may not actually receive a trophy. Our AI-powered fulfillment system is still in beta.

Oh, you want to know about our revolutionary tech stack? Buckle up, because this is going to blow your mind with its sheer simplicity and complete lack of buzzwords.

We're proud to announce that the AI Darwin Awards website is built using the most cutting-edge technology available: HTML, CSS, and a tiny sprinkle of JavaScript. That's right—we're using the same groundbreaking technologies that powered the web in 1995, like absolute savages. We believe in the Just fucking use HTML philosophy.

Our sophisticated architecture consists of:

• Frontend Framework: None. We write HTML like our ancestors intended—by hand, with love, and without 42 layers of abstraction
• State Management: The browser's built-in state management system, also known as "variables"
• Build Pipeline: A TypeScript script that runs faster than most developers can say "webpack configuration"
• Database: Static JSON files, because sometimes the old ways are the best ways
• CSS Framework: Our own lovingly handcrafted styles, written by humans who remember when CSS was just CSS
• Deployment: We copy files to a server. Revolutionary, we know

Speaking of our JSON data format choice: yes, we could have used XML to be "proper" and standards-compliant, but we're not masochists. JSON is modern(ish), human-readable, and doesn't require three PhD theses to understand its structure. While XML purists might weep at our casual disregard for angle bracket orthodoxy, we sleep soundly knowing our data files don't look like they were written by robots having an argument with themselves.

You might be wondering why we didn't use React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Gatsby, Astro, Remix, SolidJS, Qwik, or the 47 other JavaScript frameworks that were released while you were reading this sentence. The answer is simple: we believe in the radical concept that websites should load quickly and work reliably without requiring users to download the entire internet.

Our JavaScript bundle weighs in at a whopping few kilobytes—roughly the same size as a single emoji in most modern web applications. We use just enough JavaScript to make sure that the browser is awake and paying attention; and to auto-expand the odd section when linked to directly, because we're not complete monsters.

We know this approach might seem shockingly primitive to developers accustomed to installing 2,847 npm packages just to display "Hello World," but sometimes the best technology is the one that just works. Our site loads instantly, doesn’t delete production databases, and doesn’t need a 14‑service microfrontend to render a sentence. Satire should not require a Kubernetes cluster to display a punchline.

In a world where developers need Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, edge computing, microservices, and an AI-powered deployment pipeline just to serve a blog post, we're proud to be the digital equivalent of that one person who still uses a flip phone and consequently has better battery life than everyone else.

Disclaimer: No Node.js processes were harmed in the making of this website, primarily because we didn't use any.