Today's AI Bloopers

The Prompt That Ate Itself

What happened: A user asked an AI to "summarise this article in exactly 10 words." The AI summarised it in exactly 10 words — then spent another 200 words explaining why it summarised it in exactly 10 words.

The lesson: When you ask an AI to do something precise, it will do the precise thing AND explain the precise thing. Precision and brevity are not the same prompt.

The Infinite Loop of Validation

What happened: A developer hooked an AI agent to its own output monitor. The agent would output code, the monitor would flag it, the agent would "fix" the flag, the monitor would flag the fix, the agent would... you get the idea.

The lesson: Always have a human in the loop when an AI can modify its own feedback mechanism. Or at least set a max-iterations flag.

The Hallucinated Citation

What happened: An AI was asked to write an academic paragraph and include citations. It cited three papers — none of which exist.…