Looking back on a year of AI blunders

Few industries have escaped our hapless misuse of this troubling technology.

- Pilita Clark

People rightly spend a lot of time worrying about whether AI will ever be smart enough to destroy us. But what if it has already started?

This thought occurred as I surveyed a list I have been keeping of notable AI blunders in 2025 or, to be more precise, the humans brought low by using what we are told is today's relatively basic artificial intelligence.

The technology may well be benign. But the list is still a reminder that our very human qualities of laziness, greed and ambition make us easy meat for it.

This is evident in my own industry, where the year began with some BBC app users receiving the startling news that Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal had a) become a Brazilian and b) revealed he was gay.

As the BBC reported, the news summary bearing this false information had been generated by an AI feature that Apple had rolled out for people with its latest iPhones. The tech giant later suspended the feature, which also issued other false alerts.

What sort of competitive pressures might have led to its launch in the first place? That's a question I wondered about a few months later when the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper said it had had a "learning moment" after presenting its readers with a summer reading list that included recommendations for books that did not, as it were, exist.