{"id":15093,"date":"2026-08-10T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15093"},"modified":"2026-08-10T12:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:01:14","slug":"chinese-farmer-kills-25-acres-of-crops-after-following-ai-generated-weed-and-pest-control-advice-farmer-trusted-pesticide-recipe-after-months-of-successful-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15093","title":{"rendered":"Chinese farmer kills 25 acres of crops after following AI-generated weed and pest control advice \u2014 farmer trusted pesticide recipe after months of successful advice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Jowi Morales <\/strong>
\n •
\nAugust 10, 2026\n<\/div>\n\n

<\/p>\n

\n

An elderly farmer in Chuzhou, China, has been following AI advice since he started using it a year ago, but after months of interactions, it recently gave some terrible advice that led to the death of his entire crop. According to Taiwanese outfit CTWANT<\/em><\/a> <\/em>[machine translated], 67-year-old Wu initially didn\u2019t trust the AI app but eventually changed his mind after it proved to be useful. Unfortunately, this mistake turned out to be disastrous, as it directly caused the death of 150 mu, or 24.7 acres, of sesame seedlings.<\/p>\n

Wu asked the AI for advice on weed and pest control, after which it came up with \u201cHundred Acres of Sesame Grass Control + Pest Control,\u201d and recommended that they use \u201chigh-efficiency flupyrimethalin\u201d and \u201cflusulfasulfaether\u201d to kill weeds and mixed it with \u201cthiamethoxazine\u201d and \u201cmethyl salt.\u201d The farmer followed the AI\u2019s advice to the letter without confirming the information via agricultural technicians (or even just counter-checking its answers online).<\/p>\n

The very next day<\/h2>\n

The result of the AI\u2019s mistake was quickly apparent, as, just the following day, the weeds and the sesame seedlings died en masse. \u201cIf you spray it, the next day the seedlings won\u2019t survive,\u201d Wu said during a video interview. \u201cBoth the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster.\u201d <\/p>\n

When he asked the AI why this happened, it suggested that the \u201cflusulfasulfaether\u201d might be behind the issue. Agricultural experts said that this chemical was primarily used against broadleaf weeds in soybean fields. The USDA [PDF<\/a>] categorizes sesame as a broadleaf plant, meaning it will also be easily affected by this herbicide. Furthermore, this chemical is designed for targeted spraying on affected areas only and shouldn\u2019t be applied to the entire field. The farmer claimed that the AI did not warn him of the risks of following its answers, but its chat page had a reminder that said, \u201cAI generation may be incorrect, please verify.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although AI is a powerful tool, it also has a history of giving bad advice and making bad choices. Just a couple of days ago, one developer had his entire profile directory deleted<\/a> during a routine backup procedure after it encountered a typo. Even Meta\u2019s AI Alignment director fell victim to this, after she had to manually terminate her AI agent to stop it from accidentally clearing out her entire inbox<\/a>. That\u2019s why it\u2019s imperative that users are aware of AI\u2019s limitations every time they use it.<\/p>\n

This is one of the first instances in which we reported an AI mistake resulting in a physical consequence in the real world. We also cannot entirely blame the person for trusting the tool \u2014 after all, he was skeptical of it at first, meaning it produced results that made the farmer trust it over time. But even if an AI\u2019s output has been reliable recently, that doesn’t mean that it is absolutely trustworthy. After all, current LLMs are nothing but prediction engines \u2014 you cannot guarantee a correct answer every time you use them, especially if they have been trained on a public knowledge base whose dataset hasn\u2019t been completely filtered for accuracy and factuality.<\/p>\n<\/article>\n

Read the full article →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jowi Morales • August 10, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}