GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
This government sure loves its AI slop, doesn’t it?
While presenting at the global AIDS 2026 conference in Brazil this week, officials at the US State Department proudly displayed a map of Africa that seemed to be beamed from an alternate reality.
Apparently intended to lay out where the US could commit health funding, the cartographical catastrophe mislabeled every single country it highlighted.
Nigeria, a coastal country, was placed smack dab in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, in southeastern Africa, was moved to the Horn of Africa. Uganda and Malawi had incorrectly drawn borders.
And worst of all, nobody noticed that the country literally called the Ivory Coast was now shown as a landlocked nation.
How could such a horrifically inaccurate map be made? An analysis by Reuters found that it contained an AI watermark indicating it was generated with an OpenAI model, making this another likely case of an AI hallucination that went overlooked by people who have completely surrendered their brains to a piece of technology that offers to do their work for them. OpenAI, Reuters reported, said it was investigating the report.
U.S. government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference — Guardian pic.twitter.com/Qf89AjCkA8 — NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) July 30, 2026
Numerous conference attendees immediately spotted the errors and posted pictures of the mangled map online. AIDS expert Emily Bass first flagged pictures of the map in a Substack post which went viral on LinkedIn, according to Reuters.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” Matt Petit, an expert on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, wrote in a post with over 40,000 views.
... continue reading