Many criticisms of the spread of artificial intelligence are theoretical or difficult to measure. We don’t know how many people have been influenced by disinformation spread by artificial intelligence. But from time to time, we come across real, tangible cases where AI interferes with people’s lives.
For example, an AI-generated content farm tricked thousands of Irish people into the center of Dublin for a supposedly three-hour Halloween parade. The parade never happened. After attempting to disperse a crowd of thousands of misinformed people, the Irish National Police was forced to issue a statement informing the public that no parade had ever been planned.
Defector investigated a website that posted a false message about the event. The site, called “My Spirit Halloween,” is apparently based in Pakistan and is dedicated solely to promoting Halloween events around the world. The idea is to use Google search in such a way that when someone searches for Halloween events in their city, the “My Spirit Halloween” site appears at the top of the results and can expect to generate advertising revenue.
More popular websites engage in the same practice to get easy traffic, such as when people search for when the next season of Stranger Things will be released. But it looks like My Spirit Halloween either used artificial intelligence to automatically generate the listings, assuming that cities like Dublin would have festivals going on. Or it was just trolling people – at one point, the site hinted at the possibility that Mr. Beast would be present at the festival.
This is one way that Google’s algorithms and how it decides to rank content can have a real impact on people’s lives. A less disgusting example would be recipe websites that have a very long introduction before the recipe itself; another tactic aimed at ranking high in search.
An event page for a proposed parade in Dublin now includes the following statement:
“We hereby inform you that the information that has misled thousands of Irish people is a major mistake made by our content creator. Furthermore, it was not done intentionally. And we apologize to our Irish brothers for this misunderstanding.”
