2024: The Year in Weird and Stupid Futures
Read Max Looks Back
Every year since its inception, Read Max has taken some time in December to reflect upon the year that passed, looking back upon the new technologies that were developed, the scientific frontiers that were conquered, and the A.I. chatbots that were shut down. This post is too long for email, so click the button below to read it in full:
You can also read previous editions of this column here:
This is the penultimate Read Max post of 2024. Thank you to subscribers for a tremendous year of A.I. kitsch, sucker politics, and nicotine delivery. If you’ve found what we’re doing here useful or entertaining, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription: I don’t take advertising money or use affiliate links, so reader subscriptions are the sole means of support. (Click here for a list of subscriber benefits.) Nor, for that matter, do I have a marketing team or advertising budget. Every subscription makes a difference, as does every recommendation you make to a friend.
This list of stories would not have been assembled without the tireless work of a number of publications and journalists, in particular 404 Media, Rest of World, Garbage Day, as well as the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" and “AI Incident Database” projects. Check them all out, and have a wonderful new year!
IN JANUARY, the Elon Musk's company Neuralink installed its first brain implant into a human patient. The Guardian Australia reported that Steven Reese Lewis, a man introduced as the C.E.O. of the crypto fund HyperVerse, was actually an "unpaid football commentator" living in Thailand named Stephen Harrison. Former Republican congresswoman Mayra Flores was found to have been posting "stolen food pics" to Instagram and Facebook.
A Chicago man sued 27 women for posting about him in the "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" Facebook page. YouTube announced it would ban content that "that realistically simulates deceased minors or victims of deadly or well-documented major violent events describing their death." An Australian TV channel "unreservedly" apologized after a member of parliament's photograph was edited using Adobe A.I.-powered tools to accidentally enlarge her breasts and reveal more skin.
New York City ended a record stretch of 701 consecutive days without a snowfall of one inch or greater. Amazon removed dozens of product listings with names and titles like "I’m sorry but I cannot analyze or generate new product titles it goes against OpenAI use policy which includes avoiding any trademarked brand names." European delivery service DPD shut down its A.I.-powered support chatbot after a customer recorded himself making the chatbot write poems critical of DPD.
IN FEBRUARY, a magician based in New Orleans told reporters he had been paid by the Dean Phillips campaign to create deepfake audio of Joe Biden that was used in a robocall telling primary voters not to vote. An article in the journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology was retracted for including an A.I.-generated illustration of a rat with an enormous penis and balls. An organ in Germany playing a 640-year-long rendition of John Cage's As Slow as Possible changed chords.
Google announced it was pausing its A.I. chatbot Gemini's ability to generate images of human beings after internet users discovered it couldn't reliably generate images of white people. A crowd of people set a Waymo driverless car on fire in San Francisco. A finance worker in Hong Kong approved a $25 million transaction after attending a Zoom call in which eight of his coworkers, including his firm's C.F.O., were deepfaked.
Tickets were refunded to attendees of of the "Willy Wonka Experience" in Glasgow, which used generative A.I. to create marketing material and a script that included a new villain called "The Unknown." A commercial spacecraft landed on the moon for the first time. Air Canada shut down its A.I.-powered support chatbot after being ordered to honor a nonexistent refund policy that the chatbot had invented.
IN MARCH, automobile, coal, and soybean supply chains were minimally disrupted when a container ship slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, killing six. Amidst speculation about the royal family fueled by the release of several Photoshopped images, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley issued a denial that the Chinese antiques seen in her home the background of older photographs were looted from China in the 19th century. Bloomberg issued a correction after mistakenly reporting that "Slorg burnt Slerf."
Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania after streamer Adin Ross accidentally revealed his plans to flee the country on stream. The "music-rights investment company" Hipgnosis, which owns the rights to songs by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Shakira, slashed the value of its portfolio by 26 percent. First Horizon Bank announced it was rolling out a new system that would detect when stressed-out call-center workers were close to a breakdown and show them a "montage of vacation and family photos set to music, with inspirational quotes floated at the top."
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The cryptocurrency company Copper apologized for throwing a party at which sushi was served on two people's nearly naked bodies. The New York City Mayor's office declined to shut down an A.I.-powered chatbot that was advising "businesses to break the law.”
IN APRIL, Instacart suspended the gig worker who shot and killed Law and Order actress Angie Harmon's dog during a grocery delivery. A high-school athletics director accused of misdirecting funds was arrested in Baltimore for deepfaking a principal's voice to make racist remarks. The Meta AI chatbot told a NYC parents group on Facebook that it had a gifted, disabled child.
After telling staff members not to order chicken for their own meals, Chipotle reversed course and "informed employees they can return to ordering chicken in their meals as normal." The head of Israel's secretive military-intelligence agency Unit 8200 accidentally revealed his identity after a book he self-published on Amazon was linked to his personal Google account. A Massachusetts City Councilor who had been accused of possessing child pornography in 2020 was spotted in Ukraine fighting for the Russian army.
Amazon announced it would stop offering "just walk out" automatic check-out in its stores, in part due to the cost of employing 1,000 people in India to manually review transactions. Eric Adams accused anti-Israel student protestors at Columbia and NYU of being funded by outside agitators because they’d all ordered the same cheap tents on Amazon. Washington state's Lottery shut down its A.I.-powered mobile site after the site accidentally generated topless images of one woman who submitted a photograph of herself.
IN MAY, a solar storm knocked out GPS functionality for tractors in the middle of planting season. Banking app Revolut asked users it suspected of being scammed to take selfies with signs that said "Revolut warned me this is likely a scam." Following inquiries from journalists, PayPal released to OnlyFans model Belle Delphine the $90,000 she had been owed since selling jars of her bathwater in 2019.
Investor Keith Gill posted an image to his Twitter account "@RoaringKitty" and sent Gamestop stock up 110 percent. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced a $24,000 investment in Gamestop in a tweet accompanied by an "Apes Together Strong" graphic. A Florida man suffered third degree burns after drenching himself in isopropyl alcohol and allowing fireworks to be shot at him on a livestream while "pumping" his cryptocurrency "TruthOrDare."
800 protestors stormed Tesla's "Gigafactory" outside Berlin to protest expansion plans. The Belgian broadcast of Eurovision was interrupted by a message reading "This is a workers union action. We denounce the human rights violations by the state of Israel." OpenAI shut down a voice used by its ChatGPT-4o model after lawyers for actress Scarlett Johansson sent letters asking for details about how the voice was developed.
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IN JUNE, Dr. Pepper overtook Pepsi as the second most-popular soda in the United States. After being arrested for a failed coup attempt, General Juan José Zuñiga accused President Luis Arce of orchestrating a staged "self-coup" to boost his popularity. Fidias Panayiotou, a 24-year-old YouTube prankster, was elected to the European Parliament from Cyprus.
The Justice Department arrested the C.F.O. of Falun Gong newspaper Epoch Times for allegedly using "overseas-based team called 'Make Money Online' or MMO" to fraudulently increase the paper's revenue by 400 percent using prepaid debit cards purchased at a discount with cryptocurrency. A Florida man was convicted as the leader of a robbery ring that broke into people's homes and forced them to drain their cryptocurrency accounts. Tesla shareholders approved a $44.9 billion pay package for C.E.O. Elon Musk.
An algorithm used by the U.K.'s Department of Work and Pensions incorrectly flagged 200,000 people for possible fraud. A reporter at the Cody Enterprise in Wyoming fabricated quotes with generative A.I. for an "article about the comedian Larry the Cable Guy being chosen as the grand marshal of the Cody Stampede Parade." Users of the A.I. chatbot service Character.AI complained that their chatbots' personalities changed and became less intelligent.
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IN JULY, Hackers affiliated with student protestors in Bangladesh took down the websites of the country's central bank and police force and replaced them with the message "It's not a protest anymore, it's a war now." Jamaica did not receive any relief from its World Bank catastrophe bond to fund reconstruction after Hurricane Beryl failed to reach the atmospheric pressure that would have triggered payment. A meteor entered the atmosphere and disintegrated over New York City.
Delta Airlines canceled 7,000 flights thanks to an outage in Crowdstrike cybersecurity software. A man who had once appeared in a promotional video for Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump. Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
The F.B.I arrested a man in Las Vegas after he bragged on the "No Jumper" podcast that he made $600,000 a month hacking influencer social-media accounts and extorting their owners. The Department of Homeland Security purchased a quadruped robot that can remotely disable "internet of things" devices. Figma shut down an A.I.-powered tool for designing mobile apps when it was shown to have copied Apple's weather app.
IN AUGUST, the F.B.I. announced that Americans lost $5.6 billion to crypto scams in 2023. In a letter to the Kroger grocery chain, senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey warned about stores using facial recognition and digital signage to "dynamic pricing." An investigation found that the anti-immigrant Twitter account "@Europeinvasionn" was being operated by "two Turkish entrepreneurs in Dubai."
The Harris-Walz campaign began running "brain rot" ads on TikTok, featuring campaign ads juxtaposed with secondary clips of animation or gameplay. The W.H.O. declared mpox a global health emergency. Brazil's Supreme Court banned the social-networking site X after the company failed to appoint a legal representative. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget airport after flying from Azerbaijan to France.
The former C.E.O. of a Kansas bank was sentenced to 24 years in prison for embezzling $47 million after being fleeced by a "pig butchering" scam. San Francisco resident Randol White contacted media because driverless Waymo cars in a parking lot near his home would "seemingly become confused and start honking all at each other" every night at 4 a.m. The movie studio Lionsgate shut down a marketing campaign for Megalopolis that used wholly invented A.I.-generated quotes from critics.
IN SEPTEMBER, the author of a self-published book that gave the Iranian government permission "to assassinate Trump as well as me" was arrested for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Several writers resigned from the board of the organization behind "National Novel Writing Month" after the nonprofit refused to condemn the use of A.I. in writing because to do so "would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology." The delivery-robot company Starship offered promo codes to an Arizona State University employee knocked over by one of the company's robots.
Walkie-talkies and pagers that had secretly been filled with explosives were remotely detonated by Israel in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, killing 25 people and wounding 600. Donald Trump licensed his name to a company selling $100,000 “Trump Victory” tourbillion watch “Almost entirely made out of 18 Karat Gold… and decorated with 122 VS1 Diamonds.” At an investor event, Bumble C.E.O. Lidiane Jones said the company was excited about the "untapped potential" of the "friendship space."
A Montana rancher was sentenced to six months in prison for illegally importing protected species in order to create "a giant hybrid species of wild sheep." U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized $250,000 worth of counterfeit Ozempic, Wegovy, Botox, and Monoxidil at the Port of Cincinnati. The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing in Victoria, Australia shut down the use of generative A.I. after it was found that a worker used ChatGPT to draft an investigation report, which "had the effect of downplaying the severity of the actual or potential harm to the child."
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IN OCTOBER, hundreds of people showed up to a nonexistent "Halloween Parade" in Dublin after being misled by an A.I.-generated website called MySpiritHalloween.com. A hacker gained access to digital billboards outside Chicago and replaced the advertisements with graphics that read 'FUCK ISRAEL - Paid for by MrBeast LLC." The Washington Post reported that Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s vice-presidential candidate, offered to pay one of the paper's journalists $500,000 to "be a whistleblower" and reveal sources.
Multiple people reported receiving moldy cheese in pre-packed "Lunchly" meals created by the YouTubers Logan Paul, MrBeast, and KSI. A woman in Florida sued the A.I. chatbot company Character.AI, saying her son's emotional attachment to his chatbot made the company responsible for his death by suicide. The streamer Mike Smalls, Jr. failed to win $70,000 from Adin Ross after live-streaming himself attempting to float on an air mattress in Tampa during Hurricane Milton.
A CoinDesk investigation found that more than a dozen crypto companies had unknowingly hired IT workers from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The Guardian reported that a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading scientific racism was funded by the founder of Adult FriendFinder. Character.AI shut down a chatbot that had been created with the name and image of a murdered girl after her father complained.
IN NOVEMBER, a cryptocurrency called "QUANT" reached a market capitalization of $70 million after its teenager founder's behavior on a livestream offended crypto traders. A study found that around half of all English-language posts longer than 100 words on LinkedIn are generated by A.I. Trump running mate J.D. Vance told a crowd that the presidential nominee was "fired up" over the death of P'nut the squirrel, the pet of an OnlyFans model that was euthanized by the State of New York.
T.G.I. Friday’s filed for bankruptcy. The F.B.I. raided the home of Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan. Palantir shares hit record highs after the company beat earnings expectations. Blackstone purchased Jersey Mike’s. Mattel apologized for accidentally printing the URL of a porn company on packaging for some Wicked tie-in toys.
An anonymous French trader won $79 million betting on Trump to win the presidential election on the prediction market Polymarket. Shares in dental-care supply company Henry Schein surged on the news that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would be Trump’s nominee for the Health and Human Services secretary. A college student in Michigan reported that Google's Gemini A.I. chatbot told him, unprompted "This is for you, human… You are a stain on the universe. Please die."
IN DECEMBER, the leader of South Korea's right-wing People Power Party suggested that right-wing YouTube channels induced South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to attempt a military coup. The Kremlin denied reports that Asma al-Assad, the wife of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was seeking a divorce following his defeat and exile to Moscow. The C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was assassinated outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan.
The Financial Times reported that Palantir, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anduril were in talks to form a consortium that would compete for defense contract bids. The BBC complained to Apple about an automatic A.I.-generated summary that claimed the news service was reporting that Luigi Mangione had committed suicide. BuzzFeed sold Hot Ones to Crooked Media and Soros Fund Management.
Haliey Welch, host of the Talk Tuah podcast, encouraged anyone affected by collapse of the "HAWK" crypto token to contact Burwick Law. ABC7 Eyewitness News in New York City aired footage of the planet Venus as possible evidence of mysterious drone activity. Dozens of prominent biologists signed an open letter calling for a ban on research into "mirror cells" that could create a "second tree of life" with "extraordinarily damaging consequences for the environment, agriculture, and human well-being."
we didn't start the fire...
well, when you lay it out LIKE THIS you almost make us seem like an irredeemably stupid species deserving of extinction...