The man behind the viral AI website that spoofed a fake Halloween parade that saw thousands of people gather on the streets of Dublin on Thursday, October 31, says it was “just a mistake”.
Nazir Ali, owner of the website MySpiritHalloween.com, said Wired in an interview published on November 1, he said that “this was just a mistake” and insisted that he and others working on the site were not scammers.
He admitted that ChatGPT was used for them to write the article in question, but not in its entirety. He claimed that artificial intelligence was involved in about 10 to 20% of the development of the article, while “we were involved in 80%”.
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“We apologize to our Irish brothers,” said Ali. “We are very disappointed, very embarrassed and frankly, we feel bad.”
The Halloween parade was said to have been organized by Macnas, according to CBS News. The Irish theater company has already organized an annual Halloween parade in Dublin starting in 2013, but nothing was planned for this year, according to The Independent.
But he told the BBC that the writer had used a list from a previous parade when creating the post and was “unaware” that the parade was not happening.
Aerial view of Dublin.
Guven Ozdemire/Getty/Stock Image
The website owner claimed that the intentions of those working on MySpiritHalloween.com were “very pure” and suggested that they had gone to great lengths to produce “authentic content”.
“We have not been informed by anyone in Ireland that this parade will not take place,” he told the BBC. “If they had told us before the evening, we would have removed it.”
But he said the list was changed as soon as they learned of the error. “We even wrote ‘this is cancelled,’ but it was too late,” he said Wired.
But he didn’t have a direct answer when asked by the media whether website content creators would continue to rely on AI to help them in their work. But he admitted that they “should double check” and “triple check” their work going forward.
“We really don’t want to mislead any of our Irish brothers,” Ali said, before repeating: “This was just a mistake.”
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Ali said Wired that MySpiritHalloween.com, which expects MySpiritHalloween to be delisted from Google as a result of the debacle, has only been operating for about three months.
The website generates revenue by posting about holiday events around the world, and according to the owner, makes money through Google Ads and affiliate marketing, and the creators only work about three or four months of the year.
Police, meanwhile, managed to clear the streets of Dublin after crowds formed due to the non-existent parade.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education