(NEXSTAR) — A non-existent Halloween parade in Ireland has brought more unfavorable attention to concerns about AI. On Thursday night, thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin, awaiting a parade that never began.
It turned out the announcement came from a spooky season resource site called MySpiritHalloween.com — and from an AI-written article housed on the site.
Many would-be parade-goers immediately noticed something was off with the alleged event, noting the lack of police presence and barricades on social media. This was especially odd consider the event's listing alluded to the possible attendance of soccer champion Cristiano Ronaldo and YouTuber Mr. Beast.
"Someone did pull a big #hoax," said X user Artur Martins, who was among the crowd. About an hour of waiting later, local police arrived with news: there was no parade happening and everyone was asked to disperse safely.
Many Dubliners noted being fooled since the MySpiritHalloween.com posting claimed to have been organized by Irish group Macnas, which hosted Halloween parades up until 2013, People reports. Details about the "parade" made the rounds on social media and Dubliners were presented with news about the parade from multiple sources — but all of it traced back to the website's AI article.
The website is owned by entrepreneur Nazir Ali. In an interview with WIRED, Ali expressed disappointment at the way he is being portrayed in the media, saying the incident was caused by a misunderstanding and that everyone involved was "highly embarrassed."
Per Ali's explanation, his SEO agency creates websites and ranks them on Google. He says the company hired content writers who were in charge of adding and removing events all across the globe as they learned whether or not they were happening. He said the Dublin event went unreported as fake and that the website quickly corrected the listing to show it had been cancelled.
"We are highly depressed that everyone is reporting against us. They're calling us scammers, saying that we scammed," Ali told WIRED's Katie Knibbs. "This was not on purpose!"
Ali said that his website was built and helped along by the use of AI but that the technology only accounts for 10-20% of the website's content. He added that, according to him, AI content won't completely help a website get ranked on Google's first page and that the reason so many people saw MySpiritHalloween.com was because it was ranked on Google's first page — due to what he calls "80% involvement" from actual humans.
According to a statement on MySpiritHalloween, the AI article was allegedly "missed" by a content writer who proofed it.
In conversation with CBS News, Ciarán O'Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies misinformation, had a less generous view of MySpiritHalloween and the alleged oversight, saying that while some of the events listed on the site were real, the website also featured other fake reviews, fake social media pages and AI-generated content.
Later that night, the Dublin Airport posted a photo of its deserted entryway with the caption: "Our Halloween parade in full flow this evening."
AI slop sites
While Ali emphatically denies that the site ever intentionally misguided people, many in the media took the opportunity of the incident to remind people about the dangers of websites known as "AI slop."
AI slop sites — also known as AI chum — are websites that owners fill with AI-produced content (typically of poor or no quality) that's intended to "exploit Google search" so that when someone looks for certain topics like "Halloween events near me," for example, the site will pop up and earn some ad revenue, according to tech news outlet Gizmodo.
But as with anything you encounter online, it's important to do a little bit of research to determine where the content is coming from. Gizmodo recommends that if you're unsure whether a site is real or not, check out its "About" page — which should feature detailed information about the people who operate and contribute to the site.
Others investigating the MySpiritHalloween debacle have also noted some discrepancies about where the site is based. O'Connor noted on X that the "site claims to be based in Illinois but all signs point to person(s) behind it being based in Pakistan."
Defector, a sports and culture blog, corroborated O'Connor's claim, calling MySpiritHalloween, "A website based in Pakistan that consists solely of listings for Halloween events, some real and some totally made-up."
Interested in how you can better learn to spot AI-generated writing? MIT Technology Review, a news outlet founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recommends several methods. An easy tool is to focus on words like "the," "it," or "is," which will sometimes appear more often than is necessary, as generative AI is likelier to use common words instead of bigger and more descriptive words.
