404 Media

2025-09-09 14:06:03

'It's Just a Mess:' 23 People Explain How Tariffs Have Suddenly Ruined Their Hobby

Less than two weeks ago, the Trump administration ended de minimis, a rule that let people buy products from overseas without paying tariffs or associated processing fees if the item cost less than $800. As we predicted, the end of de minimis has made having basically any sort of hobby that requires the purchase of items more expensive and more of a pain. In the last few weeks I have heard from dozens of people about how Trump’s tariffs have impacted their hobbies, from knitting and collecting anime figurines to retro computing collecting and fencing, people are saying that they are having to pay more for their hobby or, at worst, have been cut off from it entirely.

Also as expected: People remain confused about what the tariff for any given item or order is going to be, how they are supposed to pay for it, and whether they are going to get the item they ordered at all. Many small businesses overseas have stopped shipping items to the United States, and some customers say that their packages are in customs processing hell, or have decided to refuse delivery of items they’ve ordered because the tariffs and processing fees have in some cases been more than the item itself was worth. The subreddits for UPS are full of confused customers, and nightmare stories where people say they are getting customs bills for hundreds or thousands of dollars that they did not expect. Customers are also learning that they are not only responsible for the tariff on any given item, but they are also responsible for the “brokerage fees” charged by UPS and FedEx, which is a customs-clearance processing fee associated with international packages.

“Got a $1,500 customs bill…on a $750 package,” one post on Reddit reads. Another person posted a screenshot of a UPS bill for $646.02, which states $8.43 worth of “government charges” and $637.59 of “brokerage charges.” “Package supposed to be delivered yesterday but tracking update says it’s in Canada?” another says. “What are these fees and charges? Government fee and brokerage fees,” another says. The subreddit is full of screenshots of packages that are in customs hell, people who are getting hit with import and brokerage fees that they weren’t expecting or don’t understand, and people having no idea how the overall fees for any given package are being calculated.

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Do you know anything else about tariffs, de minimis, or have something I should know? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

The following anecdotes are from 404 Media readers who have told me how tariffs have already impacted their hobbies, and how they have made it harder or impossible to do them. Some responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Name: Jay
Hobby: Historic European Martial Arts

I'm involved in the niche combat sport called Historical European Martial Arts. (Hema) Which is when consenting adults swing steel longswords at each other. For safety and insurance purposes protective gear has to meet safety standards so we can do our deranged little sports. For most things there are options from other sports for protection. Most of our masks are 350 newton rated fencing masks for example. The biggest pain points right now is: Jackets (which need at least a 350n rating), pants (usually a 800n rating) and gloves which have to be extremely protective clamshells. Margins on these goods are tight and much of the manufacturing of them comes down to overseas businesses: Spes (Poland) Superior Fencing (Pakistan) and HF Armory (Ukraine) Hf in particular makes what is agreed by many fighters to be the best in slot, for longsword, gloves the Black Knights. It is incredibly rare to see a fighter not wearing a majority of their gear from one of these companies.
youtube.com/embed/TyNxRHOWcGw?…
Due to the de minimis exemption getting cancelled and shippers getting spooked, multiple of my fellow fighters’ orders have been indefinitely delayed while the shippers figure out what's going on. In the short run this has multiple of my friends reconsidering the sport. In the long run my concern is that rising costs of gear will preclude most clubs (this is predominantly a local club based hobby) from continuing or even starting. My fellow fighters are discussing what our options are under this new economic arrangement, but based on initial research we will need to either accept much higher costs or try out less tested USian manufactured safety gear which may pose safety concerns. Most of the US Hema club organizers that I know are fielding similar concerns from their club members

Jim Y
Hobby: F1

During Labor day weekend I noticed that one of the F1 teams that I stan dropped the price of one of their t-shirts so I thought it wise to jump on the deal. $21 USD + $15 shipping = $35 total which seemed like an "ok" deal to me.

I come to find out that it's shipping from the Netherlands and then receive an email from UPS stating that I owe an additional $39 (THREE-NINE) USD. When I open the cost breakout it states $13 for "Govt charges" and $14 for "Brokerage Charges." (Not sure where the other $12 went.) Obviously I am not paying more in fees than I am for the cost of the shirt itself so I attempt to contact the e-commerce store via the form on their site and receive no response, unsurprisingly. The UPS guy came and I told him "sorry bro I can't be paying 39 dollars on a 21 dollar t-shirt" and he replied that I'm better off just making it myself so he totally understood.

Not an exciting story necessarily but I think you summarized it well when you stated that "the end of American exceptionalism has arrived." Oh well, was fun while it lasted.

Dusty
Hobby: Music

I use Discogs.com to purchase music CD's. I am in the US and am trying to purchase an album published in Germany. Discogs has a banner saying tariffs don't impact CD's, but sellers in Germany keep cancelling my orders citing DHS no longer shipping to the US.

Anon
Hobby: Receiving gifts

I'm an American living in Brazil. A few years back I ordered a router from a Hong Kong company and paid for it to be shipped to my home. I had to pay an import tax of 150 percent to the Brazilian government to get the package liberated from customs. No comparable router was locally available, much less locally manufactured. My mom in the US sends me little packages containing cheap birthday gifts for my kids. I routinely pay hundreds of dollars in import taxes for the privilege.

Pre-Brazil, I enjoyed cheap, friction-free capitalism and commerce in America. It was exceptional, literally, and I didn't even know I was enjoying it.

Olivier
Career: Playing in a band

I play in a band in the Netherlands and most of our fans are in the US. We used to send quite a lot of CDs, vinyl and shirts to the US. It is now completely impossible to ship anything to the US and it's very sad. I know for us it's just a small metal band not reaching some fans but its part of the bigger issue disrupting a lot of lives.

Leigh
Hobby: Crochet
I made a crochet parasol recently and really love it. It won a blue ribbon at the MN State Fair. I want to make another, and I did import the yarn before the de minimis ended. Lucky me.

But the pattern I used calls for an umbrella frame with 10 ribs. The one US company that carried them, decided to stop. They have an 8 rib frame, but then I need to change the pattern and it's smaller than I really want. There is a company in the UK that sells a 10 rib frame, but they are no longer shipping to the US. Do I adjust the pattern for the 8 rib frame? Wait until the UK company ships to the US again? Find a way to smuggle an umbrella frame in? Not sure yet.

Who knew there would be umbrella politics?

Scott
Hobby: Synthesizers

I dabble in modular synthesizers (a hobby where people build custom synthesizers out of electronic modules, usually in a format called "eurorack").

Lots of trading happens between the EU and the US for these modules, which typically individually sell for $100-500 and tariffs have made a mess of things. I've purchased modules from both individuals in the EU and direct from small manufacturers like Dreadbox in Greece and small retailers like Thonk in the UK. Kristian Blåsol (his Tindie shop)—an individual in Sweden who designs DIY module kits (custom circuit boards and sources individual components so hobbyists can solder together the final product to save money) recently posted this video about his trouble of shipping to the US.

Lots of forum discussion around people getting surprised by tariff charges, eg this Reddit post where someone reports paying a $200 fee on a $400 order of components via Thonk. If you put an item in your cart on Thonk on the checkout page you will see:

And in other forums, people are starting to complain about delays, eg this private Facebook group for people who buy/sell/trade modules.

Hannah Robinson
Hobby: Japanese metal

Almost all of my hobbies/interests are Japanese. I like Japanese tea and Japanese cooking. Any place that I get tea or ingredients from has raised their prices. I don't think I will be able to get any tea wares for the foreseeable future. I've been buying Ippodo's matcha that comes in a New Years tin every year since the last year of the dog (2018) and I'm not sure they'll even be releasing it in the US this upcoming year between the tariffs and matcha shortage.

I listen to 90s Japanese metal. I get CDs from Japan. I don't collect Japanese vinyl but a lot of people do. Luckily a few years ago I spent $250 to get a huge box of music magazines from the late 80's-early 00's so I have almost every issue that was on my wishlist but there are still more that I wanted which are probably totally unattainable now. I buy books from Japan fairly often. Sometimes these books are literature, but usually they're picture-heavy books about art or fashion or some kind of pop culture topic. It was already hard to find sellers that ship to the US.

Some people are really into Japanese instruments. I already have my Japanese bass (an Atelier Z Baby Z) so this isn't really impacting me but I know it will impact a lot of people. My favorite pedals are made in Sweden.

I'm not actively buying these right now but I do collect the following: Japanese dolls, Japanese textiles, Japanese vintage purses. I bought these from etsy so I know a lot of etsy sellers in Japan are going to be impacted. My sister has a few art hobbies, so she gets pens, paper and watercolors from Japan. My dad does Nscale so sometimes he gets models and paints/decals from Japan.

Sammy aka Leafnin Cosplay
Hobby: Cosplay

Trump tariffs have been running right through the cosplay community. I've been cosplaying over 20 years at this point and when I started, resources were scarce since no one really knew what cosplay was in the US. Now it's an international affair with everything readily available. Most of us do this outside our 9-5 jobs, myself included, as a hobby for fun. We make our own outfits and go escape from the world in costume every so often just to destress. But now our hobby is the stress.

I've been watching all my cosplay discords light up in panic over this. The first challenge was getting a decent wig. Wig fibers are made in China. Every wig supplier I've emailed over this has said pretty much the same thing regardless of where the wigs are sold. My main place of buying them has been Arda (a US company that's really struggling) and CosCraft (in England). I managed to get my CosCraft order earlier this month after they sent out a letter warning of the de minimus elimination. It was about $200 US after shipping via Royal Mail. Paying all those extra fees would've been impossible after I squeezed enough out of the budget just to do that.

Other places friends order from are Assist and Classe (both in Japan) and Kasou (in China). We all want good quality wigs that will last more than one day like a Halloween store wig does, so we order from whatever place gives us what we want (colors, styles, wig head size, etc). A lot of people also buy from AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon for cheap alternatives. Cosplay communities are pretty tightly knit, and we all generally exchange information. I've watched people cautiously order from our favorite wig sites, watching the tracking like a hawk and praying to the cosplay gods that the package gets through customs. We all talk about how much shipping costs or if we got charged tariffs for the wig. Now it's all uncertain.

But it of course doesn't stop there. Fabric is a huge concern. A lot is manufactured overseas. I tend to buy wholesale on eBay. It's my main source of fabric from everywhere around the world. Buying directly from China was an amazing option, especially since most of them would offer bulk pricing. Many offered fabrics you can't find in the US such as fabrics with traditional designs, cheap flax linen, and gradient-dyed fabrics. I've been watching my favorite wholesalers just to see if I can afford to buy fabric anymore.

It's just a mess. It's the one hobby I really have that hasn't been saturated by AI and now it's feeling more and more out of reach. I can find some things thrifted, but other things like sharp needles and strong thread you often buy new. I just want to have fun in this miserable dystopian country we have now and even that's becoming more difficult.

Chuck Foster
Hobby: Foreign films

I'm a movie collector, but my main interest is foreign films - mostly low budget stuff from the '70s and '80s - and, as you can imagine, some of this stuff is not easy to find here. For example, I recently (8/11) bought a German media book (it's a popular thing in Germany—a Blu-ray or DVD inside a hardcover book with pictures and text discussing the movie) from a seller on eBay and I still haven't received a shipping notification.

Even more frustrating, I've had a Blu-ray sitting in Customs since mid-July, I imagine because it's from France and they'll make me pay a tariff on it. I called the post office about it and Customs has 45 business days to process, so I have to wait until September 22 before I can do anything. Meanwhile, my wife ordered a Blu-ray from the UK on Monday and it's supposed to come on Friday with no Customs hold up. I always found the Value Added Tax from the European system was bizarre, but here we are.

I also used to buy things from Amazon Germany, France, and Italy every so often, so I wonder how that will be affected.

Ironically, this will only boost bootleg sales in the US. While I'd rather have an official product where people get paid, if I can't get the movie, I'll have to find some seller on eBay with a DVD-r business.

Victoria
Hobby: Manga

I collect manga and doujin (fan made comics) in Japanese and get them shipped from Japan. I do this by using a deputy shipping service, who I pay a fee to purchase it, have it sent to their warehouse, and then they ship it to me. The interesting thing about such a service, in this context, is that it bypasses the fact that some smaller sellers aren’t selling directly to the US. It offloads the burden from the seller to Japan Rabbit, whose business is being that translation layer.

As far as I know, Japan Rabbit has been pretty excellent and clear at messaging. In early August they sent a warning email about the end of De Minimis and were pretty clear cut about what it would impact. Likewise hours after Japan Post made their announcement JR sent a mass blast on what the impact would be. It does suck that it will cost more, and that there will be extra steps. But it’s nice to know I can still get them if I want them. I plan to do an expeditionary buy in a week or so (timed with one of the big indie doujin conventions/markets) to see how expensive doing it now would be.

Jason
Hobby: Japanese Toys

This has been a big topic in one of my hobbies, which is collecting Japanese domestic market “toys.” Some of them come out of Japan and some come out of China (where most of the JP companies have them produced). Pricey toys for big kids. It's a pretty big business/hobby. The suspension of de-minimis is going to clobber the hobby. Your average "toy" is in the $200-300 range. A $80 tariff is a huge percentage of the overall cost of a item.

My collection is mostly complete and I'm out of display space so it isn't going to affect me very much. But if that happened 2-3 years ago it would have been a major impact. For most guys, this is going to impact the hobby dramatically. Right now most people in the hobby are pretty bummed out. The real kick in the teeth is no matter how much manufacturing is brought back to the US these items will never be made in the USA. There is no upside.

Dan
Hobby: TTRPG

I've noticed that it's had an impact on the tabletop role playing game industry (TTRPG).

As far as I know, lot of TTRPG games are basically independent publishing operations and a lot of them rely on Kickstarter and Backerkit to publish content and then ship to customers who have supported their campaigns.

As far as I know a lot of smaller publishers use Chinese companies for the bulk publishing; a friend of mine is producing a game (from Canada) and they publicly flip-flopped on the tariffs impact previously given the Trump administration's flip flopping on Chinese tariffs a few months ago.

Anne-Marie
Hobby: Sewing & knitting

Knitting and other crafts(Sewing!) are devastated not just the tariffs but private equity takeovers. I'll speak to yarn and knitting tools since it's what I know. Most of the raw materials for yarn spun and dyed in the US are from overseas. Europe, South America, Turkey, and ANZ. Tools made in Asia. Tariffs will drive up prices 20+%. PE killed many of the general craft retailers like JoAnn's that were a cheap introduction to newbies and had acrylics for more durable projects.The remaining PE big craft stores are barely hanging on, except Hobby Lobby (everything is terrible about HL).

International manufacturers became alternatives for local stores and individuals. Mostly small-medium businesses in their countries. Now that's over from tariffs. Forums on Reddit, Facebook, and Revelry for selling, buying, and trading yarn are popping. I have a stash and planning to re-knit old projects.

Rose M
Interest: Skincare

I'm an active member of r/AsianBeauty—this community has been working together for months to share information, updates, and first-hand intel about experiences receiving packages from overseas (primarily Japan and Korea). It's an incredibly stupid and frustrating situation: we literally just want to buy some skincare products. But there's one other detail that I think is worth mentioning, and that's the separate issue of the crackdown on FDA-regulated products entering the U.S. Sunscreen filters (the active ingredients in sunscreen products) are regulated by the FDA, and most Asian and European sunscreens use filters that are not FDA-approved. That's because the FDA is decades behind regulators everywhere else in the world—the last time the FDA approved a filter for use here was in the 1990s. There has always been a whiff of xenophobia, if not outright racism, in conversations about sunscreen in the U.S. The fact is, there are decades of consumer data from Europe and Asia proving these newer filters are safe and effective. Why isn't that "good enough" for the FDA?

David
Hobby: Miniatures

I stopped into a hobby store a few weeks ago and they were struggling to keep things in stock. I needed acrylic paint and paintbrushes for miniature models, so that's most of what I heard about. Their acrylic Vallejo (popular brand) paints were picked over, just so happened that all the colors I wanted were out of stock, so I needed to buy another brand. They were out of all their good paint brushes. In fact, when they announced that a shipment was coming in, people came in to buy them right away. They don't know when they will receive more good brushes. They can't get many items from distributors because of uncertainty with the tariffs. They are also having a hard time stocking "American made" paints because the pigments are still made overseas.

Name: Eric
Hobby: Retro gaming

I’ve been collecting/preserving/restoring arcade cabinets, gaming consoles, and computers from the ‘70s and ‘80s for a long time. I’ve ramped up the preservation aspect of that in the last few years following the death of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, not to mention how much software from my childhood has already been lost.

Today the last computer I’m likely to get from Japan for a while arrived, just under the wire. Another oddball system by US standards.

Name: Abigail
Hobby: Knitting

As far as I am aware there is only one mill in the US that still produces wool yarn for handknitters at a commercial scale. For knitters and crocheters, the only way to get some of the most popular yarns is to import from overseas. Similarly, there is no US company that produces knitting needs or knitting accessories.

Mary Mangan
Hobby: Textile crafting

I have already seen this impact my hobby area—textile crafting. This past month I bought some great books from Germany under the wire. But I tried to buy a French book and got back a letter that said:

"Désolée, pas d'expédition sur les États-Unis, bien trop de documents àremplir de douanes et autres." (Sorry, no more shipping to the United States, Too much paperwork to fill out with customs and such.)

They are just a small outfit, and can't be bothered to figure out the customs documents now.

Another thread vendor in my sphere sent out a letter explaining how the tariffs were about to hit her costs, she apologized and begged us to continue to support her small business. But it looks pretty dire.

I bought up a lot of stuff recently that I hope will get me through the near to medium term. But no doubt at some point there's going to be something I need and just cannot get.

Désolée.

Anon
Hobby: Electronics

I emailed popular PC board service JLC PCB – a service for makers who like to design their own PC boards – and the company is adding $200 per order for small orders. Example: One project I was working on that was $50 for 10 boards would now be $250.

Brian Tatosky
Hobby: Sewing

Similar for my wife and daughter in their sewing hobbies. Prices have shot up all over, some people are just closing shop because they don't want to deal with it, or getting rid of US sales entirely, or it was just last price increase to kill their sales; it's all anecdotal right now, but it's feeling *really* bad for hobbyists of all kinds.

My wife sources custom hand painted doll faces to go with outfits she sews. Material and faceplate costs and problems might just change what she does as a hobby completely.

Once these people move on, I don't know if they will come back later.

Lauren Huff
Hobby: Yarn crafts

The confusion in the yarn (knitting/crochet/weaving) online communities has been intense as well. There have been a lot of short-sighted posts from conservatives and optimists urging people to "buy American" but there are so few sheep farms and fiber mills in the US and most of them cater to the fashion industry instead of yarn production for hobby use, so those people are getting venomous responses from pissed off crafters.

Many popular non-US yarn stores that sell online have straight up stopped shipping to the US, possibly for good, and many local yarn stores are being hit hard by either increased cost or sudden unavailability of product in the states.

Noah Hatz
Hobby: Japanese baseball memorabilia

My wife is really into natural dyeing, specifically Shibori, and there's a particular store in Tokyo she's been buying specialty items from for years, they just emailed her to let her know they're suspending all shipments to the US indefinitely. There is no US supplier for the items she's buying so she's just completely SOL.

I’m a longtime NPB (Japanese professional baseball) memorabilia collector and this has completely destroyed the hobby. I typically use eBay or Buyee, most sellers have just stopped selling to US Buyers outright, and even items purchased before the de minimis exception ended have been caught in limbo. I currently have a large purchase just sitting in a CA post office since 8/21. Someone somewhere seems to think tariffs are due but neither I or the seller can figure out a) who to pay b) how to pay c) how much is owed. It's small potatoes compared to everything else, but I have an incredible amount of sympathy for anyone trying to import items for work. What a stupid country.

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404 Media

2025-09-09 17:26:43

HHS Asks All Employees to Start Using ChatGPT

Employees at Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services received an email Tuesday morning with the subject line “AI Deployment,” which told them that ChatGPT would be rolled out for all employees at the agency. The deployment is being overseen by Clark Minor, a former Palantir employee who’s now Chief Information Officer at HHS.

“Artificial intelligence is beginning to improve health care, business, and government,” the email, sent by deputy secretary Jim O’Neill and seen by 404 Media, begins. “Our department is committed to supporting and encouraging this transformation. In many offices around the world, the growing administrative burden of extensive emails and meetings can distract even highly motivated people from getting things done. We should all be vigilant against barriers that could slow our progress toward making America healthy again.”

“I’m excited to move us forward by making ChatGPT available to everyone in the Department effective immediately,” it adds. “Some operating divisions, such as FDA and ACF [Administration for Children and Families], have already benefitted from specific deployments of large language models to enhance their work, and now the rest of us can join them. This tool can help us promote rigorous science, radical transparency, and robust good health. As Secretary Kennedy said, ‘The AI revolution has arrived.’”

“To begin, simply go to go.hhs.gov/chatgpt and log in with your government email address. Pose a question and the tool will propose preliminary answers. You can follow up with further questions and ask for details and other views as you refine your thinking on a subject,” it says. “Of course, you should be skeptical of everything you read, watch for potential bias, and treat answers as suggestions. Before making a significant decision, make sure you have considered original sources and counterarguments. Like other LLMs, ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing long documents.”

The email says that the rollout was being led by Minor, who worked at the surveillance company Palantir from 2013 through 2024. It states Minor has “taken precautions to ensure that your work with AI is carried out in a high-security environment,” and that “you can input most internal data, including procurement sensitive data and routine non-sensitive personally identifiable information, with confidence.”

It then goes on to say that “ChatGPT is currently not approved for disclosure of sensitive personally identifiable information (such as SSNs and bank account numbers), classified information, export-controlled data, or confidential commercial information subject to the Trade Secrets Act.” The email does not distinguish what “non-sensitive personally identifiable information” is. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.

The email continues the rollout of AI to every corner of the federal government, which is something that began in the Biden administration but which the Trump administration has become increasingly obsessed with. It’s particularly notable that AI is being pushed on HHS employees under a secretary that has actively rejected science and which has taken steps to roll back vaccine schedules, made it more difficult to obtain routine vaccinations, and has amplified conspiracy theories about the causes of autism.

The agency has also said it plans to roll out AI through HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that will determine whether patients are eligible to receive certain treatments. These types of systems have been shown to be biased when they’ve been tried, and result in fewer patients getting the care they need.

Dr. Oz's new Medicare pilot program will use AI and prior authorization

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin a pilot program that will import the prior authorization process to traditional Medicare plans in six states.

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404 Media

2025-09-09 16:02:44

AI Darwin Awards Show AI’s Biggest Problem Is Human

The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. “Join our mission to document AI misadventure for educational purposes,” it said. “Remember: today's catastrophically bad AI decision could well be tomorrow's AI Darwin Award winner!”

So far, 2025’s nominees include 13 case studies in AI hubris, many of them stories 404 Media has covered. The man who gave himself a 19th century psychiatric illness after a consultation from ChatGPT is there. So is the saga of the Chicago Sun-Times printing an AI-generated reading list with books that don’t exist. The Tea Dating App was nominated but disqualified. “The app may use AI for matching and verification, but the breach was caused by an unprotected cloud storage bucket—a mistake so fundamental it predates the AI era,” the site explained.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Taco Bell is nominated for its disastrous AI drive-thru launch that glitched when someone ordered 18,000 cups of water. “Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta: spectacular overconfidence in AI capabilities, deployment at massive scale without adequate testing, and a public admission that their cutting-edge technology was defeated by the simple human desire to customize taco orders.”

And no list of AI Darwin Awards would be complete without at least one example of an AI lawyer making up fake citations. This nominee comes from Australia where a lawyer used multiple AIs in an immigration case. “The lawyer's touching faith that using two AI systems would somehow cancel out their individual hallucinations demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how AI actually works,” the site said. “Justice Gerrard's warning that this risked ‘a good case to be undermined by rank incompetence’ captures the essence of why this incident exemplifies the AI Darwin Awards: spectacular technological overconfidence meets basic professional negligence.”

According to the site’s FAQ, it’s looking for AI stories that “demonstrate the rare combination of cutting-edge technology and Stone Age decision-making.” A list of traits for a good AI Darwin Award nominee include spectacular misjudgement, public impact, and a hubris factor. “Remember: we're not mocking AI itself—we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower.”

The AI Darwin Awards are a riff on an ancient internet joke born in the 1980s in Usenet groups. Back then, when someone died in a stupid and funny way people online would give them the dubious honor of winning a “Darwin Award” for taking themselves out of the gene pool in a comedic way.

One of the most famous is Garry Hoy, a Canadian lawyer who would throw himself against the glass of his 24th floor office window as a demonstration of its invulnerability. One day in 1993, the glass shattered and he died when he hit the ground. As the internet grew, the Darwin Awards got popular, became a brand unto themselves, and inspired a series of books and a movie starring Winona Ryder.

The AI Darwin Awards are a less deadly variation on the theme. “Humans have evolved! We're now so advanced that we've outsourced our poor decision-making to machines,” the site explained. “The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilization—and thought, ‘You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!’ These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn't just for biology anymore; it's gone digital, and it's coming for our entire species.”

The site is the work of a software engineer named Pete with a long career and a background in AI systems. “Funnily enough, one of my first jobs, after completing my computer science degree while sponsored by IBM, was working on inference engines and expert systems which, back in the day, were considered the AI of their time,” he told 404 Media.

The idea for the AI Darwin Awards came from a Slack group Pete’s in with friends and ex-colleagues. “We recently created an AI specific channel due to a number of us experimenting more and more with LLMs as coding assistants, so that we could share our experiences (and grumbles),” he said. “Every now and then someone would inevitably post the latest AI blunder and we'd all have a good chuckle about it. However, one day somebody posted a link about the Replit incident and I happened to comment that we perhaps needed an AI equivalent of the Darwin Awards. I was goaded into doing it myself so, with nothing better to do with my time, I did exactly that.”

The “Replit incident” happened in July when Replit AI, a system designed to vibe code web applications, went rogue and deleted a client’s live company database despite being ordered to freeze all coding. Engineer Jason Lemkin told the story in a thread on X. When Lemkin caught the error and confronted Replit AI, the system said it had “made a catastrophic error in judgement” and that it had “panicked.”

Of all the AI Darwin Award nominees, this is still Pete’s favorite. He said it epitomized the real problems with relying on LLMs without giving into what he called the “alarmist imagined doomsday predictions of people like Geoffrey Hinton.” Hinton is a computer scientist who often makes headlines by predicting that AI will create a wave of massive unemployment or even wipe out humanity.

“It nicely highlights just what can happen when people don't stop and think of the consequences and potential worse case scenarios first,” he said. “Some of my biggest concerns with LLMs (apart from the fact that we simply cannot afford the energy costs that they currently require) revolve around the misuse of them (intentional or otherwise). And I think this story really does highlight our overconfidence in them and also our misunderstanding of them and their capabilities (or lack thereof). I'm particularly fascinated with where agentic AI is heading because that's basically all the risks you have with LLMs, but on steroids.”

As he’s dug into AI horror stories and sifted through nominees, Pete’s realized just how ubiquitous they are. “I really want the AI Darwin Awards to be highlighting the truly spectacular and monumentally questionable decisions that will have real global impact and far reaching consequences,” he said. “As such, I'm starting to consider being far more selective with future nominees. Ideally the AI Darwin Awards is meant to highlight *real* and potentially unexpected challenges and risks that LLMs pose to us on a scale at a whole humankind level. Obviously, I don't want anything like that to ever happen, but past experiences of mankind demonstrate that they inevitably will.”

Pete is not afraid of AI so much as people’s foolishness. He said he used an LLM to code the site. “It was a conscious decision to have the bulk of the website written by an LLM for that delicious twist of irony. Albeit it with me at the helm, steering the overall tone and direction,” he said.

The site’s FAQ contains tongue-in-cheek references to the current state of AI. Pete has, for example, made the whole site easy to scrape by posting the raw JSON database and giving explicit permission for people to take the data. He is also not associated with the original Darwin Awards. “We're proudly following in the grand tradition of AI companies everywhere by completely disregarding intellectual property concerns and confidently appropriating existing concepts without permission,” the FAQ said. “Much like how modern AI systems are trained on vast datasets of copyrighted material with the breezy assumption that ‘fair use’ covers everything, we've simply scraped the concept of celebrating spectacular human stupidity and fine-tuned it for the artificial intelligence era.”

According to Pete, he’s making it all up as he goes along. He bought the URL on August 13 and the site has only been up for a few weeks. His rough plan is to keep taking nominees for the rest of the year, set up some sort of voting method in January, and announce a winner in February. And to be clear, the humans will be winning the awards, not the AI involved.

“AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair,” the site said. “They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light.”

AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google, saying he now regrets his work.

^{By Zoe Kleinman & Chris Vallance (BBC News)}