Artificial Intelligence can do a lot. But no one – least of all party-goers in Dublin, Ireland – had any idea that a party trick would be pulled on Halloween this year. Dublin residents took to the streets in anticipation of a Halloween carnival filled with strange costumes and trick-or-treat shenanigans, but there was no parade.
It all started with an AI-generated “MySpiritHalloween.com” website, which published details of the Mackinaw Halloween Parade event, asking Dublin city residents to attend from 7pm to 9pm during Halloween week. What happened next left many people on the streets and on the Internet confused. Thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin, but were stunned by the absence of a parade, Vice reported.
People are waiting for the Halloween parade. #dublin
No gardaí around, no official announcement, people waiting on the wrong side of the road…
someone pulled the big one #Cheat #prank pic.twitter.com/zTQUShZrya
– Artur Martins (@arturmartins) 31 October 2024
According to netizens who posted about the downer on TikTok, the city police had to spring into action to clear the streets. The city’s police, also known as Gardaí in Ireland, took to X (formerly Twitter) to inform citizens that no actual parade was scheduled and to ask people to safely clear the streets. Asked for.
It was later revealed that the website that ran the article with details of the incident was reportedly a Pakistan-based SEO company that did so for advertising revenue. In an interview with Vice, the website’s owner, Nazir Ali, insisted that the whole mess was a “big misunderstanding”.
Ali explained that he runs an SEO company that ranks articles on Google for advertising revenue. He suggested that the website was an honest work of humans and that AI was only used for “10 percent” of the work, stressing that completely AI-generated content does not rank so highly on Google. “We asked ChatGPT to write articles for us, but it wasn’t ChatGPT itself. So, we took help from AI, we took help from ChatGPT, but we optimized it ourselves.”
Whatever the case, it was a major disappointment for Dublin partygoers. Next time you make plans to go to a party that’s posted online, think twice! Maybe the AI is just playing “trick or treat” with tips.
