Thousands go to fake AI-invented Dublin Halloween parade

ADVERTISEMENT

The parade was announced by My Spirit Halloween and attracted thousands of Dublin locals to gather along a route from Parnell Square to Temple Bar for an event supposedly organised by Galway arts ensemble Macnas. It was only after the Halloween fans arrived that it became clear that the website had made the entire parade up.

My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website churned out the fictional parade, it made its way through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) onto multiple news and social media sites, spreading the fake news.

Many people came dressed up to enjoy the non-event and the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, had to disperse the gathering.

“Please be advised that contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight,” the official social media account of the Gardaí posted last night.

“All those gathered on O’Connell Street in expectation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. Thank you.”

Crowds were so huge that the Luas tram network that runs through Dublin’s city centre faced disruption across two lines, putting the Red and Green lines out of service for half an hour.

While this has been largely received as a funny incident for the many Irish Halloween fans duped into believing in the fictitious parade, it’s an alarming display for how powerful misinformation can be.

There’s been no public suggestions that the My Spirit Halloween site was acting with malicious intent. Nonetheless, the ability for an AI-generated fiction to be placed online as fact and then touted across the internet to influence the public is concerning.

The My Spirit Halloween website, hosted in Pakistan but claiming to be based in Illinois, posted the information early in the morning on 31 October claiming the parade would start at 7pm. At no point did the website imply that it was compiling AI-based information, nor that the event was not real.

It would have largely gone unnoticed if not for the parade’s “news” being picked up by TikTok users who posted about the fake event and spread awareness of it.

Prompting a gathering of thousands of people in a major city centre with a few hours’ notice is evidence of the huge influence that social media can have on the public. For it to come from an entirely automated fake source of news should ring alarm bells for authorities at the potential for malicious actors to take advantage of the power of online misinformation.