True horror: Thousands of people tricked onto the street by AI Halloween parade post

Thousands of Irish partiers were apparently led by an AI-generated post to a Halloween parade that didn't actually exist

By William Hughes | November 1, 2024 | 5:41pm

This picture doesn't have anything directly to do with the Dublin "parade," we just need to look at a picture of a meerkat playing with a jack-o-lantern for a while to regain our sanity. (Credit: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

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True horror: Thousands of people tricked onto the street by AI Halloween parade post

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Inviting a number of philosophical questions operating at various levels of depth—including “When is a large gathering of people in Halloween costumes on a public roadway not a Halloween parade?” and “Are they not teaching ‘trust, but verify’ in Irish schools?”—The Irish Times reports that thousands of Dubliners got tricked into attending a non-existent Halloween parade in the Irish city this week. The numerous attendees had apparently been led there by a post on a web site advertising Halloween events around the world that we’re not going to link here because, turns out, it doesn’t seem to be very good at it!

On the plus side, shout-out to Dublin for generating the most genuinely scary thoughts in our heads as we come down from the Spooky Season this weekend; the idea of thousands of people assembling in one place because the internet told them a really kick-ass Halloween parade was going to happen there is nightmare stuff when applied to any number of more nefarious intents. (As is, Irish cops just asked people to politely disperse, and the Dublin Airport cracked a few jokes about the debacle on Twitter.) The Independent quotes someone who says that would-be participants milled around the area for about an hour before realizing that the parade wasn’t actually happening, presumably all talking about how they take themselves and their children to places when the computer tells them to, because why would the internet lie? It also states the truly disturbing notion that the false parade posting was AI-generated, possibly going off of old data about a parade that used to be held in the city pre-pandemic; if the idea of thousands of people showing up somewhere because they didn’t double-check an AI-generated event listing, then you’re really working with a less easily-spooked constitution than we are.