Last Updated on: 1st September 2026, 04:20 pm
Tell me again about how AI is the future, because it sure as shit ain’t the present.
A school in Kentucky sent students home with a bound agenda that included absurd errors clearly made by AI. The periodic table was nonsense. The map of the U.S. lists the state of Illinois as “Vitoiis,” and Kentucky is listed as “Venecky.” There’s an extra planet called Marc, and Saturn is listed as “Sature,” among countless other gibberish errors.
Between this and Africa’s new geography, things are going super great.
A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.
The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Seriously, how does stuff like this even happen? Not the part where it escapes into the world, that part is easily explained by dumb, lazy humans. I’m talking about the bit where the AI spits it out to begin with. If a technology is trained to function based on all of the world’s best sources of information and is supposed to be smart enough to handle every aspect of our lives, why does it still routinely go so spectacularly wrong in spite of all the years and money that I’m constantly told have been poured into making it not suck?