>My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website churned out the fictional parade, it made its way through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) onto multiple news and social media sites, spreading the fake news. Many people came dressed up to enjoy the non-event and the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to disperse the gathering.
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>Prompting a gathering of thousands of people in a major city centre with a few hours’ notice is evidence of the huge influence that social media can have on the public. For it to come from an entirely automated fake source of news should ring alarm bells for authorities at the potential for malicious actors to take advantage of the power of online misinformation.
Pretty scary. Another line blurred between fake and real.
I mean… Migth as well just do the parade rigth? You dont really have any other plans if you went there in the first place and its not like there arent enough people. Why ruin the fun just because the fun is allegedly not real?
>Irish revellers flooded the streets of Dublin expecting a Halloween parade last night. The only problem? No parade had been organised.
>The parade was announced by My Spirit Halloween and attracted thousands of Dublin locals to gather along a route from Parnell Square to Temple Bar for an event supposedly organised by Galway arts ensemble Macnas. It was only after the Halloween fans arrived that it became clear that the website had made the entire parade up.
>My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website churned out the fictional parade, it made its way through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) onto multiple news and social media sites, spreading the fake news.
>Many people came dressed up to enjoy the non-event and the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to disperse the gathering.
So so it was a real party it just wasn’t registered.
So a website hosted in Pakistan and claiming to be based in Illinois posted news about Dublin. What prompted Dubliners to even see this website, let alone believe the information on it? Did other media corroborate it? Did it get posted on social media? Is it normal for Dubliners to get their news and events from random websites operated and hosted in foreign countries thousands of miles away?
It’s easy to blame AI here, but something much weirder has to have happened between “random website posts about a non-existent parade in Dublin” and “people actually show up to the non-existent parade in Dublin” for this to make any lick of sense.
5 comments
>My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website churned out the fictional parade, it made its way through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) onto multiple news and social media sites, spreading the fake news. Many people came dressed up to enjoy the non-event and the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to disperse the gathering.
…
>Prompting a gathering of thousands of people in a major city centre with a few hours’ notice is evidence of the huge influence that social media can have on the public. For it to come from an entirely automated fake source of news should ring alarm bells for authorities at the potential for malicious actors to take advantage of the power of online misinformation.
Pretty scary. Another line blurred between fake and real.
I mean… Migth as well just do the parade rigth? You dont really have any other plans if you went there in the first place and its not like there arent enough people. Why ruin the fun just because the fun is allegedly not real?
>Irish revellers flooded the streets of Dublin expecting a Halloween parade last night. The only problem? No parade had been organised.
>The parade was announced by My Spirit Halloween and attracted thousands of Dublin locals to gather along a route from Parnell Square to Temple Bar for an event supposedly organised by Galway arts ensemble Macnas. It was only after the Halloween fans arrived that it became clear that the website had made the entire parade up.
>My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website churned out the fictional parade, it made its way through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) onto multiple news and social media sites, spreading the fake news.
>Many people came dressed up to enjoy the non-event and the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to disperse the gathering.
So so it was a real party it just wasn’t registered.
So a website hosted in Pakistan and claiming to be based in Illinois posted news about Dublin. What prompted Dubliners to even see this website, let alone believe the information on it? Did other media corroborate it? Did it get posted on social media? Is it normal for Dubliners to get their news and events from random websites operated and hosted in foreign countries thousands of miles away?
It’s easy to blame AI here, but something much weirder has to have happened between “random website posts about a non-existent parade in Dublin” and “people actually show up to the non-existent parade in Dublin” for this to make any lick of sense.
Remimds me of a while back where a BLM protest and the counter protest seem to have both been organised on facebook from the same building in Russia. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-facebook-to-organize-two-sets-of-protesters
No doubt i fine tuned ai generated event could be used to rapidly make many such events next time something divisive is topical.
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