An offensive marketing campaign forced Starbucks to close all of its South Korean stores early— and AI is being blamed for the controversial mistake

It all started on May 18, when Starbucks Korea announced a marketing campaign for its new tumblers. Starbucks tumblers are popular enough to have inspired their own collector market.

The marketing campaign dubbed May 18 as “Tank Day.” Unfortunately, May 18 was already a notable date for South Koreans: It’s the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds to thousands of pro-democracy protestors were killed by military forces using tanks and helicopters.

What’s more, the marketing copy seemed to directly reference police violence against protestors with the tagline “thwack on the desk.” In 1987, police initially claimed that student protestor Park Jong Chul died from shock when a policeman’s fist “hit the desk with a thwack.”

In actuality, Park had been tortured to death — something police admitted to later.

Understandably, many South Koreans were upset. Card payment volumes at Starbucks stores fell by 26% in one week and people started taking videos of them destroying Starbucks tumblers in protest.

Starbucks did not respond to Moneywise’s request for comment.

Here’s what Starbucks executives say led to the marketing campaign being greenlit, along with other cautionary tales of what happens when a company doesn’t do enough research into a new market.

Starbucks is joining a rising trend of blaming bad behavior on AI

Shinsegae Group, a conglomerate that owns a majority stake in Starbucks Korea, said the marketing misstep was not on purpose. It also says the Starbucks Korea marketing team chose the “thwack on the desk” slogan after consulting AI.

Starbucks Korea isn’t the first company that has pointed to AI when trying to place the blame. Companies have increasingly been blaming AI for mass layoffs — even when AI adoption doesn’t tell the whole story.

“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains,” Oxford Internet Institute assistant professor Fabian Stephany told CNBC.“It’s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long term perspective and instead of saying “we miscalculated this two, three years ago, they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying ‘it’s because of AI though.’”

Companies might find it helpful to blame AI for everything from layoffs to cultural missteps because that lets complaints fall into a “responsibility gap.”

Responsibility gaps were first discussed in a 2004 article in Ethics and Information Technology. The article says that, when autonomous learning machines act in ways that their creators could not have predicted, the creators can’t be held responsible for its actions.

At the same time, the machine isn’t a human being: it cannot personally be held responsible for its actions. That creates a responsibility gap, where no one can be held responsible for a specific harm.

With the advent of generative AI, responsibility gaps have been appearing more often. In one example, Stanford Medical Center failed to prioritize vaccinating its frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, instead prioritizing giving vaccines to a group that included administrators and remote workers. Leadership said the mistake was due to “very complex algorithms.”

This isn’t the only time global companies have made cultural missteps

Even before AI, companies were making costly mistakes thanks to not understanding the culture of a market they were expanding into.