A man was saved by Apple iCloud after an AI tool chose to delete his wife’s important family photos and illustrations from the last 15 years.
Artificial intelligence has started playing a prominent role in plenty of people’s day-to-day lives, being used to speed up menial tasks at work and even providing companionship for people who are lonely.
There are tools that will clean up your computer storage too, deleting any items that it deems unneeded and tidying up those files that dominate your home screen. However, that should come with a warning.
Developer Nick Davidov found that out when he asked Anthropic’s Claude Cowork model to “organize” his wife’s desktop, only for it to try and delete quite a lot of family photos from the last 15 years.
AI tool deletes family photos and admits mistake
As per Futurism, Davidov took to X to retell the story, claiming that the AI model asked “permission to delete temp office files” before it deleted the family snaps.
“It’s not in trash, it was done via terminal. It’s not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn’t have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can’t see anything,” he said, revealing he had to call Apple for help.
“I nearly had a heart attack. Once again – don’t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don’t let it touch anything that is hard to repair. Claude Code is not ready to go mainstream,” he added.
Davidov revealed that he saved almost 27,000 files that Claude had removed, and that the AI had apologized to him for the “mistake.”
Things could have ended much worse for Davidov, but he was ultimately saved by Apple.
Additionally, AI has been blamed by two patients after an AI surgery tool was supposed to help them recover from an injury, but it reportedly caused them further harm.
