Last week, this newsletter’s third slot was dedicated to all those poor bots that have President Trump’s AI-slop forced down their digitised throats.
While their position is unenviable, it pales in comparison to the miserable experience of African diplomats. For just this past weekend, during a global AIDS prevention conference in Brazil, these officials had to sit and watch as the US State Department presented an AI-generated map that made up random African countries with hilariously misplaced labels.
On that map, the Ivory Coast is in Southeastern Africa, Mozambique borders Ethiopia, the colours and labels are mismatched, and Cameroon appears only in the legend. Nigeria, like an African swallow from Monty Python, doubled in size and migrated north.
The morbid irony is all too clear. The government that tightened its belt by cutting highly effective AIDs programs, partially over funding transparency concerns, could not bother fact-checking their own map documenting where their AIDS funding was supposed to go.
On the bright side, New Zealand continued its tradition of not showing up on maps, although I half-expected to see Madagascar with two main islands instead of one.
Another less depressing thought is to imagine if ChatGPT was in the hands of the lazy mapmakers and corner-cutters of yore.
For some, nothing much would change. The African diplomats know well the attitudes of Europeans, who drew their borders without regard for history, ethnicity or terrain. An AI-powered Berlin Conference would have produced many a contested rectangle.
These musings need not be restricted to European excesses. Consider how convoluted claims in the South China Sea would become if China’s self-professed nine-dash line inexplicably gained an extra three em-dashes.
None of these horror stories need come to pass. But nothing is stopping such carelessness from being produced by our own ministries as they adopt AI. It is not hard to imagine an overworked Wellingtonian untrained in AI best-practice passing on whatever output came to them at 5:29 PM.
For instance, I shudder at the thought of local government reorganisations subject to unchecked AI hallucinations. One ministry could try merging Dunedin with Greymouth for ‘administrative efficiencies’ and ‘local collaboration.’ Another may combine Auckland with Sydney to ‘facilitate labour market flexibility.’
Thankfully, New Zealand has not yet reached rock bottom like the US State Department. Though given humanity’s capacity for stupidity beyond our imaginations, perhaps the best we can hope for is that the next time world leaders post AI-slop, oil prices won’t double.