AI Fails: 50 True Stories of When Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms Went Off the Rails

A football camera abandons the ball to follow a bald referee's head. A city chatbot gives illegal advice. Lawyers file court cases that do not exist. Facial recognition helps send the wrong person to jail. Behind these stories-some absurd, some deeply serious-is the same recurring failure: an automated output gains authority before anyone has truly verified it. AI Fails brings together 50 documented cases involving generative AI, machine learning, facial recognition, predictive models, and automated decision systems. Courts, medicine, media, business, government, autonomous driving, and military targeting all appear here-not as a catalog of technological embarrassment, but as evidence of a larger governance problem. This is not an anti-AI book. It follows the chain that turns a technical error into a real-world consequence: AI produces; a human approves; an institution grants authority; then everyone assumes somebody else checked.