Itch.io falls prey to ‘trash AI’ as ‘bogus’ phishing claim darkens site for hours

Early this morning, Itch.io’s X (Twitter) account called out that the site was down, pointing to a phishing report delivered to the site’s registrar that caused the domain to be disabled. Of course, if you’re familiar with Itch.io and its many Android games, then you already know it is a rather popular site for indie titles, which is why the domain shortly being disabled is such a strange story.

Couple this with the claim that Funko’s (of Funko Pop vinyl figure fame) AI-powered brand recognition software is somehow the cause of the false phishing report, and the entire situation is a perfect example of why utilizing AI to do jobs humans should be doing can have ridiculous results. Thankfully, Itch.io is back up as of 7 AM Eastern Monday morning, so the downtime was luckily short-lived.

Here, you can see Itch.io’s X (Twitter) account calling out Funko, its AI-powered brand protection software known as BrandShield, as well as their own registrar for ignoring their response calling out the bogus phishing report. This is peak internet, clearly, with AI running afoul of actual humans that know better, but thanks to endless automation, it took some time to sort this mess out, where the site was unreachable to many users for about five hours.

It’s unlikely any major harm was caused by the disabled domain, but it’s still an annoyance, with some sales likely lost. But at the end of the day, it’s a pretty amusing story that Funko and the company it hired to protect its brand could have such an effect on a site like Itch.io. Chalk this one up as another instance of AI failing to do its job, a rather popular story over the past year as many companies have learned the hard lesson that AI automation isn’t always in the best interest of the users.