Many criticisms regarding the proliferation of artificial intelligence live in the realm of theoretical or hard to gauge. We don’t know just how many people are swayed by disinformation produced by AI. But every now and then we get a real life, tangible case of AI messing with people’s lives.
Case in point, an apparent AI-generated content farm deceived thousands of Irish into visiting the Dublin city center for a supposed three-hour Halloween parade. The parade was never real. After trying to disperse the misinformed crowd of thousands, Ireland’s national police service was forced to release a statement informing the public that there was never any parade scheduled.
Defector investigated the website behind the misleading event post. Called “My Spirit Halloween,” it’s apparently based in Pakistan and dedicated solely to promoting Halloween events across the world. The idea is to exploit Google search so that whenever someone is looking for Halloween events in their city, My Spirit Halloween will show up the near the top of results and can bank on generating ad revenue.
People waiting for a halloween parade. #Dublin
No Gardai around, no official announcement, people waiting on the wrong side of the road…
Someone did pull a big #hoax #Prank pic.twitter.com/zTQUShZrya
— Artur Martins (@arturmartins) October 31, 2024
More mainstream websites participate in the same practice to get easy traffic, for instance, when people are searching to find out when the next season of Stranger Things is coming out. But it appears that My Spirit Halloween was either using AI to automatically generate listings, presuming that cities like Dublin would have festivals. Or it was just trolling people—at one point, the website alluded to the possibility that Mr. Beast would be in attendance.
It’s one of the ways in which Google’s algorithms and how it decides to rank content can have a real impact on people’s lives. A less nefarious example would be recipe websites that have really long introductions before the actual recipe; another tactic to rank highly in search.
The event page for the supposed Dublin parade now includes the following statement:
We are hereby to announce that the information that misguided thousands of Irish people is a big mistake made by our content writer. Also, this was purely not done intentionally. And we apologize to our Irish brothers for this misunderstanding.
Despite this “misunderstanding,” the site now lists the event as “cancelled.”
If you’re unsure about a website’s legitimacy, check out their about page. Don’t trust any masthead that looks like this:
