AI incident #1654 ·
AI Chatbot Reportedly Recommended Herbicide Treatment Linked to Loss of About 25 Acres of Sesame in China
What happened
A 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, reportedly used an AI-generated weed-and-pest-control plan to spray about 150 mu (25 acres) of sesame by drone. By the next day, the crop had largely withered. Agricultural technicians said the recommended mixture included fomesafen, a herbicide unsuitable for blanket application to sesame. The specific AI product and model have not been publicly confirmed.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (3)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Wu (Chuzhou farmer) Chatbot users
- Alleged developer
- Large language model developers Chatbot developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Wu (Chuzhou farmer) Farmers in China Farmers Epistemic integrity Chatbot users
AI systems implicated
Large language modelsChatbotsAI-enabled decision support systemsAI-assisted agricultural decision-making
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
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