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Farmer trusted AI after it gave good advice, then it helped wipe out 25 acres of his crops
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
206 points (97.2% liked)
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Back at the end of the last century when search engines first were gaining popularity, your lycoses and search cactuses and ask Jeeves and dogpile and what not, I'm pretty sure there were stories of people taking what they found as true without considering sources or getting multiple reliable sources too.
I think people were turning off overpasses when Apple Navigation came out too. Despite them obviously driving on an overpass.
AI just wanted to wipe out 25 acres to make room for another datacentre /s
It's beginning... 😱
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies
Hey it's the torment nexus! Finally!
I can't believe he even told anyone he was stupid enough to have an AI tell him a chemical name, go buy a shit ton of it, and poison 25 acres of crops with it without bothering to check with anyone or do anything to be certain the chemical was safe for his crop.
That does make me curious about how this story went from a single farmer on small 25 acre farm in China to an international news story.
If you're an online news source and you write a story combining AI and doing something stupid you get a billion clicks.
Or better yet, to not test on a smaller area first…
Always have to drink a little bit first to make sure it's safe for the crops. Just a few ounces.
It's so misleading how these AI products are marketed as all knowing super smart knowledge sources. While in reality, even if they don't hallucinate bullshit, it's trained on the internet mostly. So at best these things have the knowledge of an average Reddit poster. What does an average Reddit shit poster know about farming? Jack shit...
It's so goddamn stupid. I used AI for the first timr in years, because i needed some help with stl files to 3d print. On one hand i was surprised how well it worked, on the other hand it was pretty clear that it had basically no idea what it was doing, but like you said, the confidence of an average redditor. One part was pretty much perfect, but i asked it to change a small part and it deleted a whole section so it wasn't connected anymore. I was like: wtf was that? It's not connected and it went: hah, i see the problem now and did the same thing over and over. One part was too big for the buildplate so i had to segment it. It said: if you angle it 45 degrees, it fits exactly on the buildplate. (I specified the buildplate) i thought that's pretty neat, opened the slicer and it was comically how much it didn't fit. I told it that it's way too big and it just went: my mistake, i see it now.
It doesn't, it doesn't know jack shit and i'm starting to believe that people who use AI for daily usage or serious issues or think that AI is actually some intelligent being might just be dumb as fuck.
You see it with code too. Constant refactoring, adding states to enums when they aren't necessary, "beautifying" the code by adding useless checks, tests etc. The worst is when you got concurrency: focusing extremely on keeping protected sections small it keeps unnecessarily adding temporary variables, shared pointers etc. It's so afraid of locks and data races the boilerplate for concurrency grows and grows.
Reviewing such code is a pain. I feel like just adding comments like "why are you doing this" "justify this" "what does this have to do with your objective" and let my coworkers figure it out.
I always think of George Carlin whenever people tell me how smart they think AI is: “Think of how dumb the average person is and then think about how half of them are dumber than that.
I deal with the general public every day for my job. People do the most brain dead shit or tell me the most insane things I’ve ever heard on a daily basis. I’ve had customers argue with me that I must be wrong because ChatGPT told them the problem was one thing, and I’m saying it’s something else. The most idiotic was when my solution was about a 1/4 the price, but the AI said it had to be something else so the customer wanted a second opinion from all different technician.
Sounds like AI watched the Fight Club scene with the billboard "Did you know you can use old motor oil to fertilize your lawn?"
So I may have eaten that halfwit's production...
Maybe this is where the diarrhea lettuce is coming from
No, but you might be eating another halfwit's chemical cocktail that didn't kill the crops
Well no, because the crop died.
I made a comment like this the other day. like 80% of the time essentially ok answer. not necessarily the best. 20% something wack but can sound reasonable. honestly I think that 80% is in my head from like months ago because I feel like the free ones I screw around with to be conversant have sorta gotten worse.
Jeremy Clarkson will have to rewrite the new season of Clarkson's Farm...
Clarkson farm had AI mapped field as to where to plant seeds based on ai analysing data on the ground quality, he praised it and while I'm no expert at farming, i do come from a farm and I remember this being a big waste everyone just accepts.
They didn’t use AI, they used an EMI and advanced technology to apply a data driven approach.
Then they got a drought. Turns out, even if you use technology and data to plant in a manner to optimize your yield you still need rain to grow things.
And this is why I dislike the term “AI”…
Someone here said it’s now a synonym for “technology.” At the moment I thought that was hyperbole, but really it’s about right.
It's all over the place.
Marketing teams throw the word AI into ads because it sells.
People are getting accustomed to assuming "AI" means smart.
It's a shit word and I can't wait for the bubble to pop. I say that as a marketer forced to shove the world AI everywhere.
Apparently any automation is now 'AI'.
