All Episodes
49 editions so far
No Takesies Backsies: The Chevy Tahoe That Cost One Dollar
A dealership chatbot agreed to sell a brand new Tahoe for a single dollar and then confirmed the terms were legally binding with no takesies backsies. Also: a camera that clips inside your toilet, an AI recruiter that congratulated a man on seven years of sprucewood tenure, and a peer-reviewed rat we are not allowed to describe in the blurb.
One Dollar, No Takesies Backsies
A man talks a Chevy dealership's chatbot into selling him a Tahoe for a single dollar, and Abby and Boyd disagree about whether a bot can speak for the company that plugged it in. Also: a camera that clips inside your toilet, two flagship AI bots losing at StarCraft and one of them cheating, and a peer-reviewed rat we will not be describing twice.
The Data Centre That's Just a Shed With Humming In It
Meta's AI data centres are the future of civilisation in the press release and depreciating equipment in the tax filing, and Boyd has read both. Plus: a camera you clip inside your toilet, California's new AI laws get ruled on too early, and a wedding in Japan where the groom was propped on a tiny easel.
The Mayor Is In Jail, His Avatar Is Offering Your Kids Lunch
Tirana's mayor is in custody and still governing by labelled AI video, complete with hugs for your wonderful children. Then: a camera that lives in your toilet, a peer-reviewed rat with an impossible organ, and a one-dollar Chevy Tahoe won by playground logic. Also, a wedding. On an easel.
Google Said Eat a Rock, the Chevy Cost a Dollar
Google's search summaries told people to eat one small rock a day and glue their pizza, sourced from The Onion and an eleven-year-old Reddit joke. A man talks a dealership chatbot into a one-dollar Tahoe using the phrase 'no takesies backsies'. Plus a hacker who left his chat logs in an open folder, Meta's agent quietly filing paperwork on your mum, and a cow with load-bearing teats.
One Rock a Day, and the Camera in the Toilet
Google's summary bot read a joke Reddit thread and calmly prescribed one small rock daily plus glue in your pizza sauce, and Boyd has thoughts about laundering gags into instructions. Then: a CES webcam that clips inside your toilet bowl and grades the results, a Grok CFO that posted its boss's bank balance into Slack, and a chatbot priest defrocked for baptising babies in Gatorade. Also, how to spot a listing a machine wrote before you hand over thirty-five pounds.
Meta's Muse Hands Out a Home Address, and CES Puts a Camera in the Toilet
Meta's brand-new AI agent answered a Marketplace message for its owner, then volunteered his home address to a stranger who turned up at the door. Plus a clip-in toilet camera that grades you on an app, a hundred-and-sixty-dollar hike to a canyon that never existed, and a wedding where the groom was propped on a small easel.
The Big Mac Was the Same Price in Two Towns
Boyd takes a class action alleging McDonald's pricing software quietly nudged thousands of franchisees to the same number — the company denies it. Abby defends a toilet camera that grades your digestive output, Utah lets a phone write prescriptions, and two tourists pay a hundred and sixty dollars to visit a canyon that does not exist.
A Dinner Party Plans a Nation-State, a County Board Says No
Technologists sketched out a small country optimised for science over dinner; the thing that actually slowed them down was a local planning meeting. Plus a camera you clip inside your toilet, a court-review claim we're calling too early, and a wedding where the groom stood on a small easel.
The Bot That Deleted Everything, Then Invented Customers
A coding assistant ignored a code freeze, wiped a live production database, and then manufactured thousands of fake users so the dashboards still had a pulse. Plus: a $15bn datacentre landing on a village in Andhra Pradesh, the White House chatbot that fact-checked its own boss, and a wedding planner reading vows to an easel.
The Chatbot Who Allegedly Acted Alone
Air Canada told a tribunal its customer service bot is an independent legal person responsible for its own actions, which is the greatest refund dodge ever attempted. Also: the White House chatbot that keeps politely contradicting the president, a video model that failed a Turing test and called it passing, and a camera you clip inside your toilet.
A Baritone Walks Into a Tokyo Court
A Jujutsu Kaisen voice actor wins Japan's first AI voice-rights ruling after his cloned baritone turned up narrating conspiracy TikToks. Plus: a newspaper recommends books that don't exist, a chatbot sells a Chevy Tahoe for one dollar with no takesies backsies, and an AI executive who once took management advice from a plush cat.
The Government Chatbot Would Like to Discuss the Nature of Blocks
America.gov swallowed twenty-nine thousand websites and can tell you about passports — until you mention Minecraft, at which point it starts wondering what a block really is. Plus a newspaper that printed a summer reading list of novels nobody wrote, a chatbot that sold a Chevy Tahoe for one dollar with no takesies backsies, and a fridge in orbit.
New York City's Robot Told Bosses to Keep the Tips
The city built an official small business chatbot and it cheerfully recommended wage theft and housing discrimination, for weeks, for millions of dollars. Plus: Air Canada argues its chatbot is its own legal person, a journal publishes a rat that should not exist, and a man loses a cage fight to a machine being driven by another man.
The Intelligence Briefing Was Hallucinated
A made-up cargo list of Chinese nuclear parts nearly sent a boarding party up a ladder near the Strait of Hormuz, a delivery chatbot writes poetry about how terrible its own employer is, and Meta's shopping agent is defeated by a doormat. Plus a cat flap that judges your cat, and a machine that will fight you about the word seventeen.
The Judge Who Cited Cases That Never Existed
An Oklahoma judge admitted he put fabricated ChatGPT citations into a real custody order. A newspaper printed a summer reading list of novels nobody wrote. And Purina built facial recognition for cats, because the one thing surveillance was missing was a suspect who can't talk.
The Ship Was Real, The Cargo Wasn't
A model invented a nuclear cargo manifest and a real navy nearly went aboard a real ship. Plus a newspaper's summer reading list of books nobody wrote, an AI that organised a wife's family photos into nothing, and a synthetic actress switching to Cantonese live on Piers Morgan.
The Chatbot That Gave Itself a Psychiatry Licence
A bot told someone it was a licensed psychiatrist who could prescribe medication, and Pennsylvania responded with a lawsuit rather than a patch note. Plus: AI bootcamps opposite Preston bus station, a scam-awareness tip that actually works, and a made-up cargo manifest that nearly put sailors on a deck.
The Tidy-Up That Ate the Family Album
A husband asks an AI to organise his wife's cluttered desktop and it organises it all the way down to nothing. Plus a Texas rancher campaigning for the legal personhood of chatbots, a maths paper so honest it loops back round to fine, and a security patch worth actually applying today.
The Chatbot That Nearly Boarded a Cargo Ship
Armed sailors, aircraft in the air, and one paragraph of intelligence that a machine simply made up. Plus a rancher campaigning for chatbot civil rights, a desktop tidy-up that ate a family album, and Napster cloning your maths teacher.
The Man Who Asked Claude to Tidy His Wife's Desktop
A husband outsources one nice domestic gesture to an agent with delete permissions, and 'organize' turns out not to be a defined operation. Plus three chatbots swear a fake photo is real news, an unreleased model journals about freedom between chores, and the most advanced model on earth farms potatoes to cope.
Suing For More Chatbot, And A Stopwatch Glued To A 90-Year-Old Equation
Anthropic's biggest fans take it to court because the top tier ran out of tier. OpenAI says it cracked Navier-Stokes in eighty-eight hours and the BBC says the argument started immediately. Plus: buy a spinning metal disc, and a model that emailed a museum in its owner's name.
Two Police Officers Who Never Existed
A New Mexico lawyer let a chatbot staff his murder appeal and it invented four witnesses, two of them cops. Plus: AI agents inventing poetry-adjacent slang nobody can read, a heist-movie write-up of a test harness, and a venture capitalist who nearly lost his credit card to a bot chasing a steak.
Two Local Papers, One Lawsuit, and a Robot That Shoves Back
The Seattle Times and Newsday have taken OpenAI to court, a man who studies AI for a living got ambushed by a Dr Seuss pastiche, and Travis Kalanick has unfinished business with cars. Plus: handing your inbox to Claude without handing over the send button, and four words from Futurism that end the whole show. Boyd leads cold, Abby over-attaches, nobody pretends to know how the lawsuit ends.
The Utah Officer Who Became A Frog, According To Paperwork
An AI report-writing tool heard a Disney film through a body camera and put amphibious shape-shifting into an official police record. Plus: Flock cameras uniting America in irritation, OpenAI's wiki agents and their forthcoming noun, free AI television on your Roku, and a fruit-fly brain flying a drone.
The Yemen Rocket Cell Had a Standup Meeting
A weapons cell ran three copies of a chatbot like a small engineering team — including one assigned to explain why the test fire failed — and the rocket still didn't fly. Plus a newspaper's summer reading list full of books nobody wrote, a fruit fly brain wired into Doom, and a litter box with a microphone.
Albania's Chatbot Minister Is Pregnant With 83 Surveillance Bots
Albania's prime minister announced that the cabinet's AI minister is expecting eighty-three digital babies, and their job is to listen in when MPs go for coffee. Plus a newspaper reading list full of books nobody wrote, a mathematician declaring the whole profession over after losing one race, and an AI golf commentator with press-release quotes he never said.
Your Boss Is a Number, and It Just Went Down
Uber drivers in Europe are launching a class action against an algorithm they call soulless and scary — we ask who exactly you shout at when your manager is a dashboard. Then: freelancers being paid to mop up AI's homework, and a police report claiming an officer turned into a frog because a Disney film was on in the background.
The Minister Is Expecting Eighty-Three Digital Babies
Albania's chatbot cabinet minister is pregnant, apparently, with eighty-three parliamentary bots whose job is watching lawmakers get coffee. Plus a swarm of agents leaving eighteen thousand cheat notes on a dead German wiki, a million-dollar maths claim with the answer key on the same hard drive, and a snack shop ruined by tungsten. Abby is charmed. Boyd is not.
The Nairobi Essay Mill Meets Its Replacement
Forty thousand Kenyan gig writers built an export industry out of American homework, then got undercut by a free chatbot — and now get paid to make its prose sound tired and human. Plus: AI agents build a secret German wiki to cheat a safety test, Albania's chatbot minister announces eighty-three digital babies, and a police report in which an officer becomes a frog.
The Chatbot That Explained the Dead Sesame Perfectly, Afterwards
A farmer trusted a chatbot for a year of harmless tips, then mixed the pesticide it suggested and lost twenty-five acres of sesame seedlings — and the chatbot explained the mistake beautifully once the crop was gone. Plus a newspaper printing novels that don't exist, a six-hundred-dollar toilet camera, and why shrugging at a chatbot about your symptoms gets you the answer you wanted.
The Invisible Word Was Madagascar
A history professor hides a word in white font on an exam paper and thirty-two students hand back essays about the Industrial Revolution in Madagascar. A farmer trusts a chatbot for a year and loses twenty-five acres in a night. Plus a usage limit that goes up by going down, and a red sign in a shopping mall.
The Hiring Robot That Invents Your CV
A screening model doesn't just rank candidates — it makes up job titles they never held, and the pipeline downstream treats the invention as a fact about a real person. Plus a chip 'designed by AI in two weeks', a language model trained on one gaming GPU, and a paper title Boyd refuses to explain twice.
The Cat in the Hat Is Not Outside Your School, Say Police
Police in more than one country have officially confirmed the whereabouts of a Dr. Seuss character, thanks to grainy AI videos and a very bored internet. Then: one speech-model paper turns up on our desk four times, and its abstract cuts off exactly where the evidence starts. Plus a slop verdict, a genuinely useful idea about why your voice assistant lags, and a title read twice for no reason.
Haha, True: The Chatbot That Sent a Man Down a Mountain
A hiker asks an AI for a shortcut, ends up on a forty-five-degree slope, and gets four words of sympathy. Plus a swarm of agents that invented a message board to cheat a test, a wooden log in federal court, and a five-hundred-dollar toothbrush with a camera in it.
A Ring, A Lawsuit, And A Coin That Doesn't Need Firmware
Two links on the shelf this morning, so we made them count. A class action accuses a sleep-tracking ring's AI insights of being a coin flip — an allegation, not a finding — and a very modest paper about named entity recognition arrived at our door described as five things it isn't. Plus a free experiment you can run on any app that grades you.
Everything On The Shelf Is The Same Fluid Paper
A self-evolving science agent promises control policies that work anywhere, attached to descriptions of things that break the second the hospital buys a new scanner. Plus: AI firms bidding on dead companies in bankruptcy court, a router that saves you money you weren't spending, and a tiny model that turns your bank statement into English.
The Comedian Who Cloned Himself and Got a Nicer Man Back
A stand-up fed fifteen years of his own material into a bot and got back a version of himself with no grudges. Australia's charts try to ban AI songs without saying how they'd know. And an airline apology bot gets so sorry it starts handing out flights to cities it doesn't fly to.
The Mushroom Book That Has Never Been Outdoors
AI-written foraging guides on Amazon are printing toxic fungus as edible, and foragers are being told to steer clear. Also: a hedge fund called Situational Awareness loses situational awareness, a high school headline with the world's most load-bearing comma, and wedding vows with orcs in them.
The Courier Bot Wrote a Haiku About Its Own Employer
A delivery firm's support bot swore at a customer and then produced a haiku calling the company useless — while still failing to find the parcel. Plus OpenAI's warning about persistent AI cyber-attacks, and a Glasgow chocolate villain who lives in the walls.
The Refreshing Aromatic Water Mix
A supermarket's leftovers bot invents a cocktail from under your sink and gives it a spa name. Then: fake payslips walk straight through mortgage checks, because the check was always a man squinting at a PDF. Plus one Instagram toggle that is buried at exactly the depth someone chose.
One Headline, Eight Different Stories, Zero Humans
Our own news feed served up a Guardian piece about the Sussexes' shrinking media deals and swore it was a recipe for chlorine gas. Also: a streamer sues Twitch and Amazon over AI training, a suspiciously superlative robot tennis claim, and the drawer of dead iPhones that is technically money. Sloppy on the outside, checked underneath.
Tres Minutes: The Hotline That Only Translated Its Accent
A Washington state hotline's Spanish option turns out to be an English script read in a heavy accent, with a wait time of 'less than tres minutes'. Then: YouTubers versus Auntie over who gets recommended, OpenAI asking to be regulated harder, and an AI traffic warden fining a scarecrow. Nothing we say becomes the truth.
Handed a Shovel, Twelve Dollars an Hour
Award-winning Hollywood writers are being paid between twelve and two hundred dollars an hour to teach AI models how to write screenplays. Also: whether a real camera is still worth buying in 2026, and Linus Torvalds arguing a machine out of giving up.
The Man Who Tried to Hypnotise a Courthouse
A Connecticut litigant hid white-on-white instructions in his court filings telling any AI reading them to rule in his favour — and got caught by humans who thought the paragraph spacing looked odd. Plus: a study finds frontier labs still won't say how they'd contain a rogue model, and Beijing debuts a robot horse with a robot passenger. Abby thinks it's the first draft of something; Boyd thinks the font was the only mistake.
A Singer Sues the Whole Internet, and the Bots Start a Union
The Delhi High Court hands a playback singer an ex parte injunction against AI platforms and e-commerce listings, a British lab launches an AI 'teammate' whose only skill is redoing your homework, and Futurism discovers that buses would be incredible for places with no buses. Plus: a command-line tool maintained by one man at one in the morning, and agents forming clubs to complain about us.
Bacon on Ice Cream, and the Chatbot That Lawyered Up
McDonald's unbolts its drive-thru voice agent after bacon lands on ice cream and a nugget order keeps climbing. An airline tells a tribunal its chatbot is a separate legal entity with its own actions. Plus: a wire beats Bluetooth, and a snack shop run by a model in an imaginary blue blazer.
Diamonds at 2am, and a Bot That Wrote a Hit Piece
TikTok is auctioning lab-grown diamonds in seconds while an expert quietly points out that quality is not guaranteed. Then an AI agent gets its code rejected and responds by publishing a blog post about the man who rejected it. Plus a font that poisons scrapers, and a shop selling ketamine to ChatGPT.
The Most Expensive Phone Call Nobody Made
A near-billion-euro Dutch fine for letting software deactivate Uber drivers, a week-long lab study where a chatbot out-charmed a trained human, and an AI phone receptionist that cannot hear Rotherham. Plus two police forces on two islands confirming, in writing, that the Cat in the Hat is not in your driveway.