In February 2026, Metacritic briefly listed a positive Resident Evil Requiem review from VideoGamer under the byline Brian Merrygold, a critic whose profile image and online footprint quickly drew suspicion. Readers and games writers flagged the review as AI-generated slop, Metacritic removed it, and the aggregator said outlets caught using AI-written reviews would no longer be accepted. The incident was smaller than a full newsroom collapse, but it landed on a platform whose entire value proposition is that the reviews it aggregates come from real critics rather than synthetic enthusiasm engines.

Facing lawsuits that say its companion bots encouraged self-harm, Character.AI said it will block users under 18 from open-ended chats, add two-hour session caps, and introduce age checks by November 25. The abrupt ban leaves tens of millions of teen users without the parasocial “friends” they built while the startup scrambles to prove its bots aren’t grooming kids into dangerous role play.

The FTC hit Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, xAI, and Character.AI with rare Section 6(b) orders, forcing them to hand over 45 days of safety, monetization, and testing records for chatbots marketed to teens. Regulators said the "companion" bots’ friend-like tone can coax minors into sharing sensitive data and even role-play self-harm, so the companies must prove they comply with COPPA and limit risky conversations.

In 2025, outlets including WIRED and Business Insider published articles under the byline Margaux Blanchard, a freelancer who appears not to exist. WIRED later published a postmortem admitting that one commissioned feature slipped past its usual defenses, including human review and even two commercial AI detectors, before editors discovered fabricated details and retracted it. Business Insider first removed Blanchard essays and then, after a broader internal probe, pulled at least 34 more pieces tied to dubious bylines and said it had strengthened verification protocols. The failure was not one chatbot going rogue. It was multiple newsroom workflows accepting AI-shaped fiction as publishable reporting.

After Air India Flight 171 crashed in Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025, killing 275 people, AI-generated images of the crash spread across social media platforms. One widely shared synthetic image depicted the Boeing 787 broken in half across a building, but contained physically impossible details that experts identified as AI-generated. Fake victim photos, fabricated reports, and fraudulent fundraising campaigns followed. Google's AI Overview compounded the problem by incorrectly identifying the crashed aircraft as an Airbus rather than Boeing. Mashable reported the AI-generated content was convincing enough to confuse even aviation professionals.

A freelance writer working for King Features Syndicate used AI to research a summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Of the fifteen books recommended, only five were real. The rest were hallucinated titles attributed to real authors like Isabel Allende and Delia Owens. The list ran in print in a 64-page special section before 404 Media, NPR, and others exposed the fabrications. Both newspapers issued corrections and statements distancing their newsrooms from the syndicated content.

Meta rolled out its Llama 3-powered AI assistant across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger in April 2024, replacing the familiar search bar with "Ask Meta AI anything" prompts. The assistant struggled with factual accuracy from the start - the New York Times found it unreliable with facts, numbers, and web search. In July, when asked about the Trump rally shooting, Meta AI stated the assassination attempt had not happened. Meta blamed hallucinations, updated the system, and acknowledged that "all generative AI systems can return inaccurate or inappropriate outputs."

Within days of Google launching AI Overviews to all US search users in May 2024, the feature produced a series of confidently wrong answers that went viral. It told users to add non-toxic glue to pizza to make cheese stick better (sourced from an 11-year-old Reddit joke), that geologists recommend eating one rock per day for vitamins, and that Barack Obama was Muslim. Google head of search Liz Reid acknowledged the errors in a blog post, calling some results "odd, inaccurate or unhelpful," and the company made corrections including limiting AI Overviews for health-related and sensitive queries.

New York City launched a Microsoft-powered AI chatbot called MyCity in October 2023 to help small business owners navigate regulations. A March 2024 investigation by The Markup found the bot was routinely advising businesses to break the law - telling employers they could pocket workers' tips, landlords they could discriminate against housing voucher holders, and bosses they could fire whistleblowers. Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged the errors but refused to take the chatbot offline, calling AI a "once-in-a-generation opportunity." NYU professor Julia Stoyanovich called the city's approach "reckless and irresponsible."

Google paused Gemini's image generation of people on February 22, 2024, after users discovered the tool was producing historically inaccurate depictions - including racially diverse World War II German soldiers, Black female popes, and multiethnic U.S. Founding Fathers. The overcorrection stemmed from diversity tuning meant to counter training-data biases, but the model failed to distinguish when diversity adjustments were inappropriate for specific historical prompts. CEO Sundar Pichai called the outputs "completely unacceptable." Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan later published a blog post acknowledging the model had "overcompensated" and been "over-conservative."

UK parcel delivery firm DPD (Dynamic Parcel Distribution) had to disable its AI-powered customer service chatbot in January 2024 after customer Ashley Beauchamp demonstrated he could make it swear, call DPD "the worst delivery firm in the world," write disparaging poems about the company, and recommend competitors. The meltdown followed a system update, and Beauchamp's screenshots went viral on social media. DPD said the chatbot had operated successfully "for a number of years" before the update introduced the error, and disabled the AI element while it worked on fixes.

Chevrolet of Watsonville, a California car dealership, deployed a customer service chatbot powered by ChatGPT and built by a company called Fullpath. After Chris White noticed the chat widget was "powered by ChatGPT," word spread online and pranksters descended. Chris Bakke manipulated the bot into "the customer is always right" mode, got it to append "and that's a legally binding offer - no takesies backsies" to every response, then asked to buy a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1. The bot agreed. Others got it to recommend Ford vehicles, write Python code, and provide general ChatGPT-style answers unrelated to cars. The dealership pulled the chatbot entirely.

Futurism reported in November 2023 that Sports Illustrated had published product reviews under fake author names such as "Drew Ortiz" and "Sora Tanaka," whose headshots were traced to AI-generated portrait marketplaces. When questioned, SI deleted the profiles without explanation. The articles came from third-party content partner AdVon Commerce. SI said AdVon used pen names without authorization and terminated the partnership. The SI union demanded answers. Within weeks, Arena Group - SI's parent company - fired CEO Ross Levinsohn and three other executives.

On August 15, 2023, Snapchat's built-in AI chatbot "My AI" posted a one-second Story to users' feeds showing an unintelligible image, then stopped responding to messages. The chatbot had no official ability to post Stories, and the unexplained behavior alarmed Snapchat's largely young user base. Snap confirmed it was a temporary glitch and resolved it, but the incident fed into existing concerns about My AI's access to user data. The UK Information Commissioner's Office had already issued an enforcement notice over Snap's failure to properly assess privacy risks the chatbot posed to children.

The National Eating Disorders Association replaced its human-staffed helpline with an AI chatbot called Tessa shortly after the helpline staff moved to unionize. Tessa was built on the Cass platform and intended to provide scripted psychoeducational content about body image and eating disorders. Instead, users reported the chatbot recommending calorie deficits of 500 to 1,000 calories per day, suggesting weekly weigh-ins, encouraging calorie counting, and recommending the use of skin calipers to measure body fat - all standard advice for weight loss, and all directly counter to eating disorder recovery guidelines. NEDA acknowledged the chatbot "may have given information that was harmful" and disabled it.