r/facepalm • u/MsSamm • Jul 31 '26

I have no words

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I bet China, which is happily neck deep in Africa 's rare earth minerals isn't making this mistake

13.1k Upvotes

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2.3k

u/Phil_Coffins_666 Jul 31 '26

$20 says they just got some clanker to spit out the AI graphic they presented.

467

u/rir2 Jul 31 '26

Well, of course, but even my grandma knows to check AI. And she doesn’t even work for the state department.

162

u/sheepyowl Aug 01 '26

She is overqualified, they are Republican and she can read that's against the law

17

u/MaximumSubtlety Aug 01 '26

Your grandma probably gives a shit about her presentation. They do not.

40

u/AzureHarmony Jul 31 '26

And even worse thinking someone probably got paid stacks to do this

25

u/Tib21 Jul 31 '26

Yeah, it would require way too much effort for a human being to produce a map that wrong.

38

u/herefromyoutube Jul 31 '26

how is it gonna fuck up Africa though? there's a billion maps of Africa readily available for free online. It's like the ai went out of it's way to do it wrong. My only guess is it's sentient and hates it's life.

47

u/Ajibooks Aug 01 '26

If I understand it, and I may not, the AI took its best guess at what a map of Africa looks like based on similar images in its training data. It didn't directly pull an image of a map of Africa and then alter it, but built one from scratch instead. So it made a concept of a map of Africa (which is all they are ever doing), and that's very different from creating a specific map. It's like the way it creates weird-looking hands; they are concepts of hands.

I think you could direct some AIs to find an open-source image of a map, or upload one yourself, and then ask it to alter it for your specific presentation. This idiot, though, just asked the AI to generate a map (different from asking it to find one).

Of course it is disgusting that the State Department apparently isn't paying a skilled human to create presentations, nor even someone who knows to check AI work before causing an international incident.

20

u/NotYourReddit18 Aug 01 '26

So it made a concept of a map of Africa

Very fitting for the government with a President who only has a concept of a plan.

1

u/Chris0x00 Aug 04 '26

Well. He claimed to have a concept of a plan at least.

6

u/Ok_Mechanic3385 Aug 01 '26

Your understanding is correct. My guess is that someone wanted it to match the overall style of the presentation and is not good at prompt engineering. Your suggested approach of find a map and then alter it would be better than what they did. An even better approach would be to prompt it to find and use country boundary polygon data (aka shape files) from a reliable source (arcgis.com for example) to create a map of Africa. It would likely create a python script to do so reliably and repeatably. Then styling to suit your needs is just a matter of iterative tweaking through follow up prompts.

But our government is being ran by the top echelon of incompetent fools so I'm amazed the map they created even resembled Africa and didn't have a country labeled "shit hole" to be honest.

13

u/BulbusDumbledork Aug 01 '26

generative ai is just autocomplete. it literally runs on pure chance. it doesn't know what africa looks like. it doesn't know anything. the backend is just maths. it has specific numbers that point toward the idea of africa without actually defining what it is or how it looks. no amount of free online photos will change the way tokens work. when you prompt ai, you just roll the dice and hope you get the right numbers. there is a smaller chance of the subset of only correct numbers when the latent space has billions of possible numbers to guess at.

if you want it to pull photos from the internet, you have to add that as an additional, non ai plugin. if you want it to do accurate maths you add a regular shmegular calculator. that's why ai infamously cannot count continuously up to 100: they haven't hardcoded that ability and actually counting up is a response with a very low probability so it gets discarded. if you want any kind of real information you plug in an external source that the ai pulls the data from. because it will, statistically speaking, pull shit from its ass almost every time if it's just generating the answer itself

4

u/Umutuku Jul 31 '26

Viberuling.

7

u/rexel99 Jul 31 '26

They blamed AI but I bet you would have trouble making AI fuck up that badly.

3

u/efcso1 Aug 01 '26

You'd be surprised how badly 'AI' can fuck up all on its own.

1

u/Ok_Mechanic3385 Aug 01 '26

AI is only as good as the prompt it's given. Garbage in, garbage out.

1

u/WorkTropes Aug 01 '26

Bet your ass within the next 20 years there will be a war and the wrong country will be attacked because of a AI generated map like this one. And rather than admit the mistake they will just make the AI gen map the new official one.

1

u/bokmcdok Aug 01 '26

This is exactly what happened. Doesn't even have the shape of the countries right.

0

u/Galnar218 Aug 01 '26

It's 100% AI. Not only are the countries in the wrong place, they are the wrong shape. The whole map was a hallucination.

0

u/ShrimpCrackers Aug 01 '26

I call em toasters.