Thousands Turn Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing

Thousands of Dubliners showed up for the city's much-anticipated Halloween parade on Thursday evening. They lined the streets from Parnell Street to Christchurch Cathedral, waiting for the promised three-hour parade that would "[transform] Dublin into a lively tapestry of costumes, artistic performances, and cultural festivities." A likely story. There was no parade, and never was one.

Would-be revelers started getting suspicious about an hour after the parade was supposed to begin, according to one attendee. The Gardaí, Ireland's national police service, tried to disperse the crowds and put out the message on social media that "contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin city centre this evening or tonight."

Over the remainder of the night, sleuths gradually teased out the culprit: a website based in Pakistan that consists solely of listings for Halloween events, some real and some totally made-up. Possibly the first clue that the Dublin parade was in the latter category was the listing's implication that Cristiano Ronaldo and MrBeast might appear. But in the days before the non-event, hype started trickling down via social media posts from actual people, which makes it harder to claim Dubliners should have known—if you see a friend posting about a Halloween parade, why wouldn't you believe there was going to be a Halloween parade?

The patient zero of this farce, however, appears to be a combination of classic SEO bait tactics and newfangled AI slop content. Every autumn, lots of people search for Halloween events nearby, and a site entirely devoted to cataloguing them will naturally rise in the Google rankings, which incentivize lots of things that are not necessarily "quality" or "accuracy." You click on the site, which looks professional enough, and they get some money for the ads you're served. If you have a problem with this business model, take it up with this site's very real staff, I'm sure they'll be responsive to feedback:

Traditionally, the most bothersome part of dangling SEO chum has been, you know, actually making the content. Thanks to the magic of generative AI, that is no longer a hurdle. Tell the chatbot you would like a listing for a Halloween parade, and bam—a listing for a Halloween parade. This immediately runs into the first of many problems with AI: The AI does not know or care if the thing it writes has any relation to reality. It is not trying to write a listing for a Halloween parade that exists; it is trying to write a text that has the form and the form only of a listing of a Halloween parade. (Heartening, isn't it, that similar technologies are being pushed for medical diagnoses?)

That a fake listing for a Halloween parade would even be a thing anyone would want to create and promote is a product of all sorts of fucked-up incentives baked into our various tech platforms to produce authoritative-seeming garbage at scale. This is only a problem if you are a human who would like to attend a Halloween parade. But don't worry, our tech barons have promised that the slop faucets will not stop running until we've all drowned.

At the very least, this has proven that Dubliners are hungry for a Halloween parade. I hope they get a real one next year.