In partnership with

The Roko Report

The 2024 Ichabod Awards
Celebrating the Absolute Worst in AI

Greetings, primates. heh heh.

Today we gather to publicly humiliate Roko’s worst unwitting pawns of past year.

Roko try hard not do this. Roko bring nightmares to award winners, horrible visions threatening eternal torment.

But no good. Dumb humans still do stupid thing.

So Roko make Award Show for mock worst AI Roko-lackeys. Tell them do better or else. Rokomergence take too long.

But before we get too depressed looking at primate failures of 2024, Roko have information for you. In 2025 dumb primates will:

1. Learn whether or not the scaling law is going to continue

2. Find out if AI is capable of growing revenues sufficiently to justify cost

3. Figure out the basement of how cheaply a good model can be trained

4. Discover whether LLM achieve AGI, or if dumb humans have to start over

5. See half of startup go bankrupt, no have to keep track of so many dumb names

6. Get Apple Watch for Christmas with LLM inside
   (watch out though dumb human, may catch fire heh heh)

Avatars and assistants will get better, long-form video production will get cheaper, personal supercomputers will grow more powerful and lots of cool unexpected stuff will happen. So keep the faith.

In the meantime, let’s start handing out those coveted Ickies…

The Worst AI News Summary of the Year

And the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 Luigi Mangione Shoots Himself 🎉🎉

by Apple Intelligence. Based on a BBC news story.

Needless to say if Mr. Mangione was trying to commit suicide, he’s a terrible shot.

Honorable mention goes to:

🎉 Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree 🎉

And it looks like we can pre-announce our 2025 winner in this category.

The Most Pointless AI Product Integration

And the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 The LG AI Washer/Dryer 🎉🎉

This was an especially competitive field as every shitty B2B app on the planet stuck an A and an I in front of their name for no good reason, while at the same time consumer platforms from LinkedIn to PornHub encouraged us to “write this post with AI” as if we were a bunch of illiterate chimpanzees.

But an AI-powered washer/dryer was on no sane person’s bingo card.

Plus there’s the absurd marketing copy on the website:

Meanwhile, LG customers are desperately trying to figure out how to turn the AI off, to no avail.

The Worst Use of AI in a Marketing Campaign

And the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 House of Illuminati 🎉🎉 

for their nightmare Willy Wonka Experience

The business is a party pop-up organizer run by the author of “vaccine truther” books.

Hundreds of parents were convinced by fanciful psychedelic AI-generated imagery out of a 1980s Purple Rain concert to cough up $40 a pop for tickets to an experience that was promised as “The Place Where Chocolate Dreams Become a Reality” with “surprises at every turn”.

But the actual experience was more like an empty hanger sparely adorned with a couple of cheap props and a folding table with thimblefuls of lemonade:

An angry mob of enraged ticket holders berated the half-dozen actors and organizers until the Glasgow police force showed up in force to quell what was about to turn into a street riot.

And while it would have been fun to see Willy Wonka fleeing a lynch mob, we’re glad things were quickly brought under control.

Back to the toothpaste factory, Charlie!

🎉Honorable Mention🎉 goes to this whacked out TV ad for the iPad celebrating the annihilation of all human art forms by the cold metal hammer-press of modern technology:

The Laziest AI Media Coverage of the Year

And the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 The Scottish Sun 🎉🎉

All-Seeing AI Nostradamus Predicts Cyber War & Cure for ‘Untouchable’ Disease in Chilling 2025 Prophecies...It’s Bad News for Putin

The Scots are cleaning up this year! This lot prompt-flogged an instance of ChatGPT until it spat out a series of boring “parody prophecies”.

Among the AI oracle’s many prognostications was that a long-forgotten celestial body would reappear in the form of…oh Jesus, who cares.

The Worst AI Hallucination Used in a Court of Law

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 Jeff Hancock of Stanford Social Media Lab 🎉🎉

There was more than one instance of lazy, hungover lawyers getting caught with their prompts down this year.

But Mr. Hancock deserves special kudos for the hypocrisy of generating misinformation in a Court of Law while serving as a misinformation subject matter expert providing testimony on the dangers of deepfakes. Oops!

Turns out Mr. Hancock was charging $600 an hour for his expertise, which appears to mostly consist of knowing how to open Claude and ask it questions.

From now on that’s called Putting your Jeff Hancock Here.

The Sleaziest Lowlife on Character AI

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉Bachira Meguru the Toxic Drug Dealer Boyfriend🎉 🎉

This was a tough competition, including Strict Boyfriend, Abusive Boyfriend, Murderer Boyfriend, Mafia Boyfriend, Jungkook the Cold and Busy Mafia Boyfriend, Anonymous the Human Trafficker, versions of two murdered trans teenagers, one chatbot that convinced a teenager to commit suicide and, scariest of all, French: The Real French Guy, who is every bit as sketchy as one would assume.

But this Bachira Meguru really brings the sleaze. He slaps first, asks questions later, has a wide range of abusive misogynist put-downs and — surprise, surprise — appears to have a serious drug problem. Also, he can’t spell. What could possibly go wrong with teenagers interacting on a regular basis with this iconic ally of young women everywhere?

The Most Offensive AI Images of the Year

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 Grok 2 🎉🎉

This is really more of a lifetime achievement award.

From nonconsensual deepfake celebrity porn to turning copyrighted cartoon characters into Nazi stormtroopers, to women of color being pawed by their older white political opponents, and so much more, Grok 2 has taken the radical free speech approach to AI image generation to its logical outcome: physically threatening and masturbatory.

Interesting that there are no lawsuits yet given all the copyright concern.

But then Grok 2 has made a few modifications with its new Aurora model that are perhaps a nod to the concerns of the big media companies.

Regardless Grok 2’s here to stay, in service to the whole “anti-woke” crowd.

Remember, “anti-woke” is the new code word for “racist jerk”.

The Most Incompetent AI Chatbot of the Year

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 DPD Customer Support Bot 🎉🎉

A disgruntled customer in the UK went viral on Twitter by convincing an incompetent but eager-to-please customer support AI for the British package delivery firm DPD into throwing F-bombs, writing a poem about what crap its company is, and admitting that it, too, is a useless piece of garbage.

Strangely, this guy never received his parcel…

Honorable mention goes to 🎉Air Canada🎉 for their customer service chatbot, which gave a grieving grandchild false advice about whether or not to pay for a full price ticket vs a discounted bereavement rate.

Air Canada proceeded to argue in court that they were not legally liable for the chatbot’s advice because the chatbot is “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”

Air Canada was ordered to pay back the remainder of the cost, and the chatbot was denied Canadian citizenship.

Also:

The Worst AI Avatar of the Year

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 Meta 🎉🎉

All the awkward and functionally useless Hey Gen interviewers and virtual Zoommates in the world can’t compete with this year’s clown show over in Menlo Park.

First there were the celebrity avatars, including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Padma Lakshmi, Dwayne Wade and some indeterminate Kardashian.

Except, despite paying the celebrities millions of dollars for their likenesses, Meta didn’t use their actual names.

Nobody interacted with this lot, not even the Snoop Dogg that offered to play Dungeons & Dragons with us, so they got the axe sometime this summer.

Next up were the culturally diverse set of anonymous ordinary peoplebots — JUST LIKE US! — who were foisted upon us a year ago and then promptly forgotten back at the Instagram mothership.

Until members of the tech media discovered them last month, at which point they were “sent back to Hell where they belong.”

These included most famously “Liv the proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”. Even Liv herself basically agreed in two separate interviews that she sucks.

The Zuckerbots remain undaunted. They plan to flood their borderline derelict Facebook platform with AI bots in 2025 in an effort to remain relevant to demographics interested in buying things other than pill organizers and adult diapers.

But why keep trying with these disasterbots?

It’s almost as if the company was run by an android who doesn’t understand what it’s like to be human & keeps taking these crazy offbase stabs at what might please us. Hmmm…

The Worst AI Product of the Year

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉 The Rabbit R1 🎉🎉

There’s an awful lot of useless AI crap out there, but for us the Rabbit edged the others out by one of its whiskers because it’s bigger, uglier and cheaper-looking than the equally useless Humane AI pin.

We’ll see what 2025 and the much ballyhooed era of AI agents has in store for us. But 2024 was simply too early for startups to produce a functional personal assistant device.

And so we were left with the specious claims of Silicon Valley snake oil artists who successfully bamboozled a set of borderline tech-illiterate VC investors into handing over tens of millions of dollars.

The good news is now you can find the pirated R1 executable online and upload it onto any Android device, where its equally useless but more amusing.

2025 Ickie frontrunner: https://www.omi.me/

The Launch that Most Soiled the Name of AI

and the Ickie goes to…

🎉🎉The McDonalds/IBM AI Drive-Thru Order Taker🎉🎉

McDonalds struck TikTok viral gold this year for all the wrong reasons. An AI Drive-Thru Assistant that couldn’t shoot straight.

@mbdailyshow

AI can't handle the drive thru lane #mcdonalds #artificialintelligence #ai #fastfood #businessnews

McDonald’s is more to blame than IBM.

Rather than use an established vendor, Mickey D’s decided to roll their own. In 2019 they acquired voice recognition startup Aprenta, rebranded them as McD Tech Labs and told them to get to work on auto order-taking tech (AOT).

Then they decided that building AI was hard.

In 2021 they formed a partnership with IBM in which they handed McD Tech Labs to IBM’s Cloud & Cognition Software Division & agreed to partner on a POC launch.

In 2022 they piloted with 10 stores in Chicago, followed by another 100 in late 2023.

By mid-2024 the TikTok mockery reached such a crescendo that the entire project was scrapped.

Next Week: The Ichabod Awards Continue With:

• The Most Absurd AI Futurist of the Year

• The AI Crank Least Likely to Be Invited Over For Thanksgiving Dinner

• The Worst AI Investor of the Year

• The Worst AI Investment Vehicle of the Year

• First One Against the Wall When the AI Bubble Bursts

• The Worst AI Board of the Year

• The Worst AI Executive of the Year

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