Irish revelers flooded the streets of Dublin in anticipation of last night’s Halloween parade. The only problem? No parade was planned.
advertisementThe parade was presented by My Spirit Halloween and will see thousands of Dublin locals gather along the route from Parnell Square to Temple Bar for the event, which is said to be hosted by Galway arts ensemble Macnas. Ta. It was only after Halloween fans arrived that it was revealed that the website had fabricated the entire parade.
My Spirit Hollywood is a Pakistan-hosted website that produces AI-generated news. Once the website created a mass parade of fiction, it infiltrated multiple news and social media sites through search engine optimization (SEO) and spread fake news.
Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to break up the gathering as so many people came in costume to enjoy the non-event.
Gardaí’s official social media accounts posted last night: “Please be advised that contrary to information circulating online, there will be no Halloween parade in Dublin city center tonight or tonight.”
“All those who gathered on O’Connell Street in anticipation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. Thank you.”
Crowds were so heavy that two lines of the Luas tram network in Dublin city center were disrupted, with the red and green lines suspended for 30 minutes.
While this is primarily seen as a funny incident by many Irish Halloween fans who have been led to believe in a fictional parade, it is a worrying example of how powerful misinformation can be.
There is no public suggestion that the My Spirit Hollywood site is operating maliciously. Nevertheless, it is alarming that AI-generated fiction can be posted online as fact and promoted on the internet to influence the public.
The My Spirit Halloween website, which claims to be hosted in Pakistan but based in Illinois, posted information in the early morning hours of October 31st claiming the parade would begin at 7 p.m. The website gave no indication that it was compiling AI-based information or that the events were not real.
This would have gone largely unnoticed had the “news” of the parade not been picked up by TikTok users who posted about the fake event and spread awareness about it.
The gathering of thousands of people in the heart of a major city with only a few hours’ notice is proof of the power social media has on the public. That it came from a fully automated fake news source should alert authorities to the potential for bad actors to exploit the power of online misinformation.
