Marketers, Deep Fakes Work
November 14, 2024
Bad actors use AI for pranks all the time, but this could be the first time AI pranked an entire Irish town out of its own volition. KXAN reports on the folly: “AI Slop Site Sends Thousands In Ireland To Fake Halloween Parade.” The website MySpiritHalloween.com dubs itself as the ultimate resource for all things Halloween. The website uses AI-generated content and an article told the entire city of Dublin that there would be a parade.
If this was a small Irish village, there would giggles and the police would investigate criminal mischief before they stopped wasting their time. Dublin, however, is one of the country’s biggest cities and folks appeared in the thousands to see the Halloween parade. They eventually figured something was wrong without the presence of barriers, law enforcement, and (most importantly) costume people on floats!
MySpiritHalloween is owned by Naszir Ali and he was embarrassed by the situation.
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….
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.”
Ali claims his website is based in Illinois, but all investigations found that its hosted in Pakistan. Ali’s website is one among millions that use AI-generated content to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Ali is correct that real humans did make the parade rise to the top of Google’s search results, but he was responsible for the content.
Media around the globe took this as an opportunity to teach the parade goers and others about being aware of AI-generated scams. Marketers, launch your AI infused fakery.
Whitney Grace, November 14, 2024
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