The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television is struggling to figure out how it can stop an automated system stuck in a recursive loop that is creating thousands of new Canadian Screen Awards nominees every day.

The academy had wanted to expand this year beyond its usual 141 categories into something “a bit more comprehensive,” spokesperson Oscar Nisansakagunu said Wednesday. “With the help of artificial intelligence and blockchain, we created an algorithm that generated new nominees for us, but … things got out of hand.”

People at the academy noticed something was wrong when the algorithm reported an error message indicating it was running out of disk space. By that point, more than 3.9 million Canadians had received nominations in 1.2 million categories. Within a month, it is expected all Canadians, and at least 10% of the world’s population, will have been nominated for at least one award. Within two months, 30% of the world’s computing power will be devoted to creating Canadian Screen Awards categories so more people can be nominated for them.

Plans are still being finalized as the academy does not know how many awards there will be in the end, but the expectation is that the awards will be given through a series of daily broadcasts starting May 1, with about 3,500 awards being given out every evening at a rate of about 23 per minute.

Schitt’s Creek creator Dan Levy leads the nominations with 94,310.