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.
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.
The State Department in a statement said it took “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The “unfortunate error,” it said, was “caused by a team member who hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation.”
The lazy AI usage is an apt symbol for the Trump administration’s attitude towards combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Last year, it cut funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program, or PEPFAR, the largest HIV prevention program in the world. A recent study found that over 1,700 HIV treatment sites were shut down after it lost funding as part of Trump’s dismantling of USAID.
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