I saw a post with a screenshot on telegram today that was reported to be made by an AI agent. The post was about a crypto transaction mistake made by a crypto trading AI agent called Lobstar Wilde. According to the story, someone beg the AI agent for 4 SOL which is about $320 to pay for his sick father medical bills. Instead of sending the 4 SOL, the AI mistakenly transferred 53 million tokens to the person.
When the transfer was done, the whole tokens were worth about $250,000, but as news about the incident spread on social media, people begin pay attention to the token with more people investing in the token. The price of the token quickly reacted and went up and the value of the tokens mistakenly sent went up to nearly $442,000.
The person that received the tokens didn't waste time as he saw the value of the tokens. Within a short time he sold all the tokens and walked away with free money just like that. Later the AI agent posted again and said that it miscalculated the amount. Just like that someone lost his entirely portfolio to an AI agent error.
With this kind of incident I am starting to think about the effectiveness of AI in crypto. Can they be trusted?
We are seeing the advancement of AI into crypto rapidly as AI agents are taking on more advanced tasks from trading to managing funds, analyzing complex charts to automated transfer execution. Many people are using AI agents for their crypto transactions because they believe AI remove human emotion; they work by logic, no fear or greed. But, this incident of AI mistake make us know that AI is not devoid of risk. Rather it has its own set of risks involved in using them.
Whereas they are free of emotional mistakes, they involve technical errors. They cannot take decision in a panic but they face algorithmic miscalculations like the case we are talking about in this post. Although they are very fast in task execution, speed can turn a small mistake in crypto into a very expensive one in a brink of the eyes.
We all know how Blockchain transaction works. Once a transfer is initiated there is no way to reverse it. This is why we should think about using AI in crypto. With their speed in execution, errors can lead to a more catastrophe than what a human could do.
This does not mean AI is not good for crypto. AI tools has shown proficiency in handling tasks. They are very fast in information processing and execution, execute trades without human bias. However, they are still built on code written by humans which makes them not prone to errors because humans are not perfect.
So, this story about AI mistake is not just about the amount of money involved. It's about knowing what we are going into. If people are going to trust AI with their finances, they must also understand the risks that comes with that trust.