Chinese Farmer Suffers 25 Acres Of Crop Loss Blindly Following AI Chatbot's Advice

A farmer in China has become the latest victim of AI use after he relied on the technology for agricultural advice, only to lose his harvest and suffer near-total destruction of approximately 24.7  hectares of farmland overnight. The 67-year-old farmer, surnamed Wu, was initially hesitant about the use of technology, but after consulting AI a year ago and receiving encouraging results, he increased his dependence.

Wu consulted the AI on almost everything, from scheduling farming activities and fertilisers to using pesticides. On July 10, he asked the AI model how to control weeds and pests on his sesame harvest. The AI quickly conjured up an aerial weeding and pest control plan that included the use of high-efficiency insecticides for weeding, according to a report in Taiwanese outlet CTWANT.

Wu followed AI's advice blindly and sprayed the chemicals on his sesame harvest, only to receive disastrous results.

“If you spray it, the next day the seedlings won't survive. Both the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster," Wu said.

Afterwards, he consulted AI again, which pointed out that one of the chemical insecticides was probably the main reason for the destruction of the sesame crop.

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Problematic AI

In April, a study found that AI chatbots often recommend alternative cancer treatments instead of chemotherapy, which could endanger lives. Researchers from the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre assessed five popular chatbots, including Gemini, Meta AI, ChatGPT, Grok and DeepSeek, covering topics including cancer, vaccines, and stem cells.

They found that almost half of the answers received regarding cancer treatments were rated "problematic" by experts who audited the responses.

Titled "Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks", the study involved researchers assessing 21 large language models (LLMs) across 29 clinical scenarios, generating a total of 16,254 diagnostic responses.