2024 has been a year of remarkable breakthroughs, but also some weird and wonderfully bizarre AI tales. One captivating story was that of the $47,000 cryptocurrency payout incident (Week 48), where an AI agent was tricked into breaking its core directive of “never give out money.” This experiment exposed vulnerabilities in AI and the security of autonomous agents.
Adding to the chaos was the saga of OpenAI’s Sora Turbo testers (Week 48), where artists protested perceived exploitation by sharing access credentials, forcing OpenAI to shut down public access within hours. On the lighter side, O2’s Daisy the Fraudster Distractor (Week 46) brought humour and utility together, as an AI-powered “grandmother” engaged phone scammers with endless chatter about knitting and family stories.
Week 20 saw the exploration of the dark forest theory of web destruction, being accelerated by agents, and how AI creators were generating a new Internet through WebSim.
Finally, the bizarre tale of Truth Terminal and the GOAT memecoin (Week 42) blurred the lines between AI, finance and reality. A rogue AI bot trained on unconventional data amassed followers and heavily promoted a memecoin, driving its market cap to hundreds of millions. This story epitomised the unpredictable intersections of AI, culture, and technology, leaving us to ponder what 2025 might bring.