Oopsie!
On the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Reichspogromnacht” in Germany), the Nazi-organized attack on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust, the German app users of the international restaurant chain KFC received the message above, which translates to “It’s memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”
In the next message, KFC apologized for the “system error.” It was not the system’s fault, however, but the fault of the humans who put the task of sending out automated promotional messages entirely in the metaphorical hands of a machine, without human oversight. No human being, especially in Germany, would come up with the idea of celebrating a tragedy on the scale of Kristallnacht with a “cheesy chicken” promotion. What happened was that the system was programed to send out a promotion coordinated with every holiday and memorial on the calendar, and nobody bothered to make sure that such promotions would be appropriate for all of them.
Quick! Somebody check with KFC Japan to see if a fried chicken promotion is scheduled to commemorate the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima!
Fortunately, this episode of technology incompetence was only embarrassing and offensive. The next example of humans carelessly entrusting tasks and decisions to computers may not be so easy to fix. Technology is a monster if it is not tamed, trained, watched carefully and used with meticulous care. Not only that, the harm it can do if employed recklessly or cavalierly, or if supervised by those without the foresight and judgment to do so competently, is the stuff of science fiction horror movies. This is a cautionary tale, and attention must be paid.
If enough people pay attention and heed the lesson, KFC may have performed a great service in its incompetence.
That is a big if, however.
Ethics Alarms 
Well, at least they dodged one small bullet in that they weren’t running an oven-baked chicken as the special.
This is not original from me:
MEAT AND DAIRY TOGETHER?!? What are they thinking? And so it goes.
Technology is a tool. It can be used for good or for evil. It can be used expertly or with gross incompetence. But ultimately, it’s still just a tool.
I remember clearly an incident when I was in the office of one of my Computer Science professors when another student came in asking for help.
He showed the professor the program he’d written and said, “I don’t understand what the computer is doing.”
“It’s doing exactly what you told it to do.” he replied. “Now let’s take a look at what you told it to do and figure out why it isn’t what you want it to do.”
That was a lesson that stayed with me for a long time. Never forget that there is a person (or people) behind everything a computer does.
–Dwayne
Maybe not for long, in an immediate sense, though of course if people do let go like that they will be responsible in a more remote sense for having done so – if, that is, external circumstances even allow them any discretion in the matter. See https://billwadge.com/2022/11/13/gofai-is-dead-long-live-nf-ai/ for a new trend, and think about its example of farmers and tractors.