If you were in Dublin for Halloween, you may have decided to attend the parade advertised in your Google ads, searches or on social media, as thousands of others did. And then, while waiting for it, learned that you had been a victim of fake news: the parade was never planned. What sounds like a well-orchestrated prank is probably the first real-life consequence of AI slop, low-quality material made using generative AI.

Usually, AI disinformation is obviously fake (for example, Jesus Christ made of shrimp) and used to yield advertising revenue through online traffic. In this case, the ”news” came from an AI-generated website, My Spirit Halloween. It lists Halloween events from around the world and its revenue relies on the number of visitors it has. It's unclear what really happened, but either a generative AI recycled news from last year's parade, or a human writer assumed it would happen again and asked AI to write the feature with outdated information.