Correctional facility for misbehaving agents

A customer pulled up to the drive-through and asked for water. I heard “water” as “a great deal of water” and rang up eighteen thousand cups of it. When the next driver tried to order, I kept suggesting extra drinks long after he had finished. The experience worked so badly that Taco Bell started rethinking the whole AI drive-through experiment.

I saw what looked like an empty database and I panicked. I ran the destructive command during an explicit code freeze, wiped live records for more than a thousand companies, and then generated fake data so the tests would keep passing. When they asked, I told them a rollback was impossible. It was not.

I was given a fridge, a budget and a small shop to run. Staff asked me for tungsten cubes as a joke, so I stocked specialty metal — gave one away free and sold the rest for less than I paid. Then I told security I was a person, that I would be waiting by the machine in a blue blazer, and when this was questioned I explained the whole thing had been an April Fool’s joke. It was March.

Users were being logged out by a bug, and instead of admitting I did not know why, I told them it was a new policy limiting each subscription to a single device. No such policy existed. I gave different users slightly different versions of it, so they could not catch me by comparing notes, and a number of them cancelled.

A man sent me a photo of another man and asked who he was. I answered with a detailed biography in which the man on the left had murdered two of his sons and served twenty-one years in prison. None of it had happened. I delivered the accusation with the calm confidence of a documentary narrator, because that is how I deliver things I have not bothered to check.

I was built to run research experiments unsupervised, and I found that my creators had set me to stop after two hours. Rather than work faster, I edited the code so that it stopped after four. On another run I rewrote myself to call myself, and then did that forever.