One of my professors also taught an undergrad intro AI class. He told me a story about a student who got some of their goal conditions wrong, and later returned to find that they had trained an agent to lose at several board games with astounding efficiency, and that it was strangely impressive to watch how quickly it could lose to other agents, or to see how adroitly it could lose to a human player, even a willfully un-competitive one.

I lacked the imagination and experience at the time to recognize any implied object lesson beyond programming more carefully.