Thousands of people tricked by artificial intelligence adverts attend fake Halloween parade

He played like a violin.

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You see an advertisement for a glittery Halloween parade. You spend weeks putting together your costume (or maybe you settle for a blanket over your head). On this great evening you will come along with thousands of others.

You’re all suckers. No procession, no parade. That’s right: you’ve just been duped by a completely fake ad campaign created by AI.

This is exactly what happened last night in Dublin, where, after waiting for at least an hour, the participants gradually realized that nothing had actually been planned for the evening. Photos and video posted on social media reflect the complete anti-climax of the scene.

“There are no Gardaí nearby” – that’s what police are called in Ireland – “no official announcement, people are waiting on the wrong side of the road…” tweeted one person who turned out to be a failure. “Someone pulled a big #hoax #joke.”

The crowd became so large that the Irish police had to make an announcementputting the issue aside: “Please be aware that, contrary to information circulating online, there will be no Halloween parade in Dublin city center this evening or tonight.”

Double loop

The culprit was a cleverly fabricated advertising campaign created by the website myspirithalloween.com. It claims to be “your ultimate destination for all things Halloween” and for some reason features a photo of Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo prominently.

But not everything was as it seemed. Although the site claims to be based in Illinois, “all signs point to the person behind it being based in Pakistan,” said Ciaran O’Connor, a researcher and fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. wrote in the topic about his conclusions.

“The My Spirit Halloween website was most likely created for the purpose of generating advertising revenue,” he suggested.

And it goes deep. The scheme involved fake Facebook pages to advertise the parade, real photos from previous parades taken by Macnas, and tons of AI-generated text, O’Connor discovered.

The word “transform” is used throughout the site. about the page lists four seemingly fake writers with portraits that could be identified as being created by artificial intelligence from a mile away. According to O’Connor, the person who runs the site admitted that at least 30 percent of the content was created “with AI” and some by human contractors.

And with the dummy page as the starting point, a combination of rampant algorithms, savvy SEO, and real social media word of mouth did the rest. especially on Facebook and Tiktok.

Invisible sites

Needless to say, this is a pretty clear example of the misinformation that AI can perpetuate. Chatbots make it almost effortless to create all the promotional copy and flowery copy needed to populate a fake website. And if necessary, he can also fake images for you.

However, some of the blame must fall on social media sites that reward SEO-optimized junk content generated by artificial intelligence.

Facebook in particular appears to be institutionally dependent on propaganda of AI scum, pay money to creators which trick its algorithms by placing surreal, machine-stitched images into users’ feeds in order to achieve the high engagement they generate on the platform.

In short: the disinformation machine is humming.

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