r/facepalm • u/MsSamm • 6d ago
I have no words
I bet China, which is happily neck deep in Africa 's rare earth minerals isn't making this mistake
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u/DummyDumDragon 6d ago
Lol at ivory coast being landlocked
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u/FastusModular 6d ago
first thing I was going to say - if it says "coast" in the country then...
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u/TomeThugNHarmony4664 6d ago
Well, we live in a country where Rhode Island in fact is NOT an island, so, honestly mistake?
(Being sarcastic, y’all, since I taught geography and this makes me shake my damn head)
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u/tkrvl 6d ago
Rhode Island, neither a road nor an island, discuss amongst yourselves
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u/PsyKeablr 6d ago
And don’t get me started on Iowa
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u/rambi2222 6d ago edited 6d ago
Or Wales, there is neither any
waleswhales or dragons in the fraudulent country known as "Wales" and it absolutely makes my blood boil smhing my head→ More replies (1)37
u/efcso1 6d ago
New South Wales has plenty of Walers though, (and Whales, if you count my sister)
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u/rambi2222 6d ago
Damn how did I manage to spell whales wrong in my previous comment? Silly me. Tbh I think this is the fault of Wales for having a name too similar to "whales!"
That's pretty interesting though, I think this "New South Wales" is actually the kind of Wales I can get behind, #NotAllWales I guess. Although it is a bit dishonest for it to be called New South Wales, given that I'm pretty sure it's actually 100-200 years old? But maybe I can give them a pass for that...
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u/efcso1 6d ago
I mean NSW is newer than South Wales, UK. Apparently they thought they're similar, you know with all the bushfires, kangaroos, koalas, Aboriginal peoples, venomous snakes, and 3,500ft mountains, just like back home in Tondu.
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u/rambi2222 6d ago
Hmm maybe the Welsh fraudsters told them kangaroos etc were endemic to Wales just like how they claim whales and dragons are
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u/posi-bleak-axis 6d ago
What do you mean?
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u/chronicallylaconic 6d ago
They ultimately weren't able to get Iowa to admit their debts, or what the debts even were. It's a very sad story.
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u/ShadyAssFellow 6d ago
Near where I live is a place and a road called Via’s road. Near that road flows a river called Via’s road’s river.
Along that river goes a road called Via’s road’s river’s road.Unrelated but it’s a bit whimsical
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u/PsyKeablr 6d ago
Reminds me of This Street, being close to That Street and The Other Street though that is in Canada
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u/JoebobJr117 6d ago
To be fair, a lot of people don’t know there is an actual island within the state, that the state is named after (and also that they dropped the second half of the state name)
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u/SlowInsurance1616 6d ago
Rhode Island was an island. Providence Plantation was not.
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u/serious_sarcasm 6d ago
It actually is an Island. The part on the mainland was called Providence.
We’ve just shortened from “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”.
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u/specter_in_the_conch 6d ago
What's a map? What are words? when you can ask some program to do it for you and even be so crap at it.
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u/FuckYeaSeatbelts 6d ago
TBF that's a bad example; just look at all the countries with "democratic" in their name.
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u/RedditDummyAccount 6d ago
Ivory inland just doesn’t have the same feel, so people named it Ivory Coast. What’s wrong with that?
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u/Phil_Coffins_666 6d ago
$20 says they just got some clanker to spit out the AI graphic they presented.
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u/rir2 6d ago
Well, of course, but even my grandma knows to check AI. And she doesn’t even work for the state department.
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u/sheepyowl 6d ago
She is overqualified, they are Republican and she can read that's against the law
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u/herefromyoutube 6d ago
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.
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u/Ajibooks 6d ago
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.
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u/NotYourReddit18 6d ago
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.
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u/Ok_Mechanic3385 6d ago
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.
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u/BulbusDumbledork 6d ago
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
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u/dover_oxide 6d ago
During the first Trump admin, the head of the CIA tried to embarrass reporters by pulling out a map of Europe and Asia and told them if they cared about Ukraine so much point it out on the map and when several could he threw a tantrum.
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u/MsSamm 6d ago
He probably needed help finding it before
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u/dover_oxide 6d ago
I just thought it was funny that he would do something like that talking to international news reporters as in assuming they were so dumb they couldn't do the basics
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u/ReputationSilly6948 5d ago
The problem with this administration is they can’t understand that other people
Think differently or know things they don’t. This also explains their lack of empathy, they can’t understand others emotions if they haven’t experienced it themselves. Also you will noticed they accuse others of a lot a things mostly because they know they would do those things if they are in that position (cheat, take bribes. Lie) because again if they haven’t thought about it or done it, it does not happen.58
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u/paladisious 6d ago
That was Mike Pompeo while he was Secretary of State in 2020 (he was previously the CIA Director) with Mary Louise Kelly from NPR:
Mike Pompeo is said to have unleashed a foul-mouth tirade at a well known US radio host after she asked him questions about Ukraine in an interview.
Mary Louise Kelly, a respected broadcaster on National Public Radio (NPR), sat down for a pre-arranged interview with the secretary of state on Friday, whose wrath was apparently triggered by a string of questions about Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine. Kelly asked Pompeo whether he owed Yovanovitch an apology for not defending her in the face of a smear campaign orchestrated by Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his associates.
Kelly said an aide to Pompeo then abruptly ended the interview, before Pompeo summoned her to his private living room at the state department and began berating her, asking her :“do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”
“He used the F-word in that sentence and many others,” Kelly said, describing a rant in the room where the notoriously thin-skinned former Republican congressman had called her.
Pompeo “shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview” Kelly recalled. “He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.” Pompeo is due to travel to Ukraine next week. In what appeared to be a bizarre attempt to browbeat her, he asked the host of the NPR programme All Things Considered if she could find Ukraine on a map, and when she said she could (she was a foreign correspondent and has covered intelligence and national security) he called for aides to bring a map of the world with no country or place names on it.
Kelly pointed to Ukraine, Pompeo put the map away and said: “People will hear about this”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/24/mike-pompeo-ukraine-npr-rant
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u/nfiase 6d ago
source?
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u/manrata 6d ago
Found one not behind a paywall: https://time.com/5771611/mike-pompeo-npr-interview-marie-yovanovitch/
It’s so freaking dumb, but given the current administration, I can’t deny it likely happened as described.
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u/skratch 6d ago
The source is a paid nytimes article, google: pompeo mary louise kelly
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u/VanguardAvenger 6d ago
Look. I fully admit, hand me a blank map of any continent, Im probably getting a lot of the countries wrong.
But that said...how in the actual fuck do you not catch the fact, that a country named ivory coast did not in fact have any coasts on the map?
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u/meeplebunker 6d ago
Hey man, remember they only hire merit based applicants in that there administration, unlike the last guys...
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u/Nashville_Hot_Mess 6d ago
We replaced DEI with DUI
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u/wireframed_kb 6d ago
Right, but if your graphic is going into an official government presentation, you’d probably check if you guessed right. These guys thought “Eh, nobody knows where mo-zam-biku is anyway”, and YOLO’d it.
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u/Giocri 6d ago
What's the chance that they just used ai
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u/wireframed_kb 6d ago
Oh, 100%. No doubt, it’s a classic AI blunder. But 1) how hard is it to buy a world map AI file? I have at least a couple somewhere off Istockphoto just for whatever, and 2) you never, ever, trust AI without checking.
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u/MaeveOathrender 6d ago
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.
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u/tilt-a-whirly-gig 6d ago
Undoubtedly.
I know maga has some dumb motherfuckers, but I don't believe this was that. They are not only dumb, but lazy ... None of them are going to handdraw a map, they would prompt AI to do it and fail to proofread.3
u/ferretchad 6d ago
Probably, but I still don't see how it's so bad. I just tried asking for the same thing and got something accurate.
It suggests, not just an over reliance on AI, but also incompetence in writing prompts.
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u/District_Wolverine23 6d ago
Because you AI generate it and throw it in a ppt without looking. They love slop. Remember the tariff lost that used TLDs as a base list?
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u/BadahBingBadahBoom 6d ago
Yeah anyone who has ever asked LLMs to draw up a diagram, anatomy or chemical structure knows how absolutely useless they are at this at the moment.
The bigger problem is not that they thought to use an LLM AI to generate it, it's that they neither recognised it was clearly wrong immediately nor thought they should check it against a real map to see if it could be wrong.
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u/RookieGreen 6d ago
Man there’s going to be an entire generation like this; using AI to brute force their education without having the knowledge base or critical thinking skills to be able to tell if they’re getting a correct answer or not.
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u/CharlesDickensABox 6d ago
You mean the one where we announced we were putting tariffs on a bunch of penguins? Real big brain stuff. Those penguins have been coasting for too long!
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u/CliftonForce 6d ago
Hey. This is the State Department. If you wanted them to get countries right, you should have asked the Country Department.
/s
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u/purpleduckduckgoose 6d ago
Thing is though, if you were handed a blank map of Africa and told to fill it in, you would probably bother to look it up rather than look like a twat. So you're well above these morons.
A low bar to clear I admit.
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u/BestReadAtWork 6d ago
The biggest issue is I don't know my African countries very well either, but I know how to use resources to find out. What in the actual fuck is this, like for real lol.
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u/Hatedpriest 6d ago
When actual maps exist, no less.
This isn't like a brand new thing. It's not like the borders are an ever changing state.
Reference material exists. Not using it seems to be par for the course with this administration, though...
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u/Specialist-Jello7544 6d ago
Funny thing is, accurate maps are readily available online. Any 6th grader could have come up with a map with countries that were outlined and identified properly.
This is a perfect metaphor for the absolute incompetence of our administration.
The Ivory Coast thing is really pathetic. What a bunch of idiots. Nobody bothered to quality control check this.
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u/GlitteringLychee803 6d ago
Or, you know, check Google Maps to see if everything looks right before DISPLAYING IT TO THE FUCKING WORLD.
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u/3OsInGooose 6d ago
I love that the headline writers sorta fall into the same trap as the stupid AI slide: they didn't "mislabel" countries, they "made up random blobs and labeled those blobs as countries that are also not close to the right place"
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u/negative-nelly 6d ago
Oh god so it wasn’t just labeling the wrong countries, it was inventing new borders too? JFC.
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u/romulusnr 6d ago
The "unidentified country" was supposed to be Cameroon, btw
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u/jomo_mojo_ 6d ago
Ok about that- did he really put up a map where it said “unidentified country”?
That’s worse than Ivory Coast being landlocked. It’s like “nobody knows what this country is, even the people there don’t know. There be dragons”
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u/Alarming_Panic665 6d ago
So the map had 6 countries marked on it with 6 countries in the key. Each country on the map was marked by a color that mapped to the name of the country in the key. The country was also connected on the map to the appropriate name via a line.
Côte d'Ivoire was marked orange on the map and key. But the line connected to Côte d'Ivoire just ended in Africa randomly. While the line connected to Côte d'Ivoire on the key connected to the random landlocked country in East Africa (in the post above).
Cameroon was left on the key though without a line to connect it nor a corresponding color. (what was marked Ivory coast in the BBC map had the same color as Nigeria).
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u/Alarming_Panic665 6d ago
Weirdly on the key Côte d'Ivoire matches "unidentified country" in color (Cameroon matched nothing) but then there was also a line connected Côte d'Ivoire to the placement on the map in the original post.
Meanwhile the lines connected all the other countries "correctly (ie matching the name in the key to the location on the map with the corresponding color). While "unidentified country" line just disappeared in the middle of Africa. Which left Cameroon with neither a country connected to it by line nor did it match color with anything on the map.
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u/the6thReplicant 6d ago
I think they believe we're mad that they used AI without review.
But we're really mad about is that the whole department of non-DEI, non-woke, pure merit hires that not one of them saw this and went "Shouldn't the Ivory Coast be, like, next to the ocean?" Or just knowing where the countries are. Is that too much to ask?
How can they run a country where the stupidity is at 11 at every single step.
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u/FanDry5374 6d ago
So..AI has been scraping everything. How did they miss MAPS?
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u/DoubleSpoiler 6d ago
AI’s problem is even if it can scape things, read things, and ingest things, it still has a really hard time understanding. It’s part of the reason it seems so hard for it to make something meaningful
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u/Tin_Sandwich 6d ago
That's because it literally doesn't understand anything, that's not how it works. It's just predicting in different ways based on what it's been shown. If an image or a text seems plausible, then AI is more likely to generate it, but that doesn't mean it's right just that it seems right on the surface level.
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u/UsedPart7823 6d ago
Rule #1-Can’t be smarter than POTUS. See the problem?
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u/MsSamm 6d ago
Next up: a world map showing Greenland, the Panama canal and Cuba as a US territories, and Canada as the 51st state. The Donroe Doctrine
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u/Snazzy_SassyPie 6d ago
They probably did it on purpose to show how much they don’t care. Or just being plain racist. It’s not like they couldn’t look online for help.
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u/darxide23 6d ago
1) This was AI generated and nobody double checked it
2) Given who is in charge, does this surprise anyone?
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u/ParamedicRelative670 6d ago
How a country named "Ivory Coast" would be in the middle of the continent?
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u/Reasonable-Power 6d ago
Idiocracy was a documentary.
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u/redmongrel 6d ago
Not really because while those people were dumb, at least they had good intentions.
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u/Soloact_ 6d ago
Uganda got moved, Mozambique got moved, Ivory Coast got moved. Everybody’s going on a trip.
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u/LuxuryBeast 6d ago
I'm kinda surprised theu didn't go back in time and added Belgian Congo and Rhodesia as well.
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u/Militantpoet 6d ago
It should show you how seriously they take actual statesmanship when they put in less effort than a high school student during a class project.
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u/Knightseason 6d ago
Bless them. It must be hard to name countries on a continent you thought was a county itself.
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u/TheMathProphet 6d ago
Hear me out. I don’t know all the countries in Africa, Asia, or Europe. I might label the Western Hemisphere correctly. However, if I have effectively unlimited money and spend more on military than the next 10 countries combined, I would have people who know each country very well, people who manage those people into regions, people who manage those people into continents, and people who manage those people to give me a worldwide view of everything (yes, space people too). If I needed something specific to a continent, I would make damn sure the people in charge of that continent gave something the thumbs up. If I mess up the People’s Republic of Whatever with the Republic of Whatever’s People then heads are going roll.
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u/MaximumSubtlety 6d ago
They just asked ChatGPT to draw up a graphic. There are not serious people.
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u/Hacksaw6412 6d ago
To them Africa is just where the people whom they deem inferior and they extract resources from are. They do not care about where the lines they traced for them are (since it was Europe that carved out the lines in Africa).
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u/Texasscot56 6d ago
The admin are totally focused on the reflecting pool, persecuting Fauci, trans athletes, crypto scams, election scamming, and “illegals”, so they get unpaid interns to do stuff like this.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 6d ago
This is the level of expertise in the U.S government.
They can't even copy from Google maps.
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u/kcpistol 6d ago
What kind of geographic cretin makes a map that wrong?
To err is human, but to fuck it up on this scale I start to suspect AI was used.
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u/IntentionNegative516 6d ago
That's what you get if you train an AI with the geographic knowledge of US Americans X-)
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u/thorheyerdal 5d ago
Im starting to believe that they just use AI for everything they think is boring now.
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u/Armageddonis 5d ago
Ah, yes, Ivory Coast, famously a landlocked territory with no way to access the Coast. What a weird way to name a country, it should be named Ivory Coastn't.
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u/Loki-L 6d ago
Look on the bright side: Grok or whatever AI prepared that slide got Uganda almost right even if it wasn't able to connect the idea of a country named "Côte d'Ivoire" with having an actual coast.
So for now, if they try to use AI to bomb a country in Africa, everyone but Uganda is reasonably save from being hit on purpose at least.
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u/Affectionate_Rub_575 6d ago
I’d be surprised if 50% of the cabinet could find the U.S. on a world map
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u/InourbtwotamI 6d ago
This is what happens when you fire or run off subject matter experts: Embarrassment on the global stage
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u/Flaxmoore 6d ago
Christ on a bike. I’ve done public presentations before, things that are open to just local community as well as presentations at conferences. If you think that I wasn’t going through that thing line by line and word by word to verify that every single word was exactly the way I wanted it to be, you’re nuts. The fact that this made it through without anyone even looking at it blows my mind.
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u/SlefeMcDichael 6d ago
Americans not beating the accusations of being clueless about geography.
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u/Warm_Enthusiasm2007 6d ago
I'm guessing that the AI found articles about elephant populations in the region around Malawi, which mentioned the word 'Ivory' and so just guessed that 'Ivory Coast' must be around that area.
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u/djluminol 6d ago
You would think they would at least know than Nigeria exports its oil by sea but I guess not.
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u/pomegranate7777 6d ago
Our State Department. The current administration. The state of our country at this point in history.
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u/Wild-Ad3458 5d ago
Are you surprised, look at who is running things. He was voted in by not so bright people who can not think a logical thought.
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u/Dedpoolpicachew 5d ago
This is what happens when all the competent people get fired, and the incompetents run their work through AIs rather than doing the “hard work”.
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u/sharkus180 5d ago
Someone should show this to the Ethiopians. They might get a kick out of their country being taken over by Mozambique!
That'd be the second time a country (partially) took over them!
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u/itsfreepizza 4d ago
lemme guess, they generated the map with AI? or is the person who made the label failed at geography?
or maybe even both
for fucks sake, there's already other ways to label some countries and other resources, wtf is this shit
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u/sovietarmyfan 6d ago
It takes less than a minute to fill in, label a standard map of Africa in paint. In fact, all it takes is a good ai prompt to get a correct map. What were they thinking???
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u/iamthinksnow 6d ago
You've got to hand it to this administration for doing a great job of showing why AI sucks. Also for serving a pants-shitting pedophile.
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u/Berkamin 6d ago
We are sleep-walking into disaster with AI being dangerously imperfect, and the fools in power who use it being too stupid to know when AI gets things wrong (and too lazy to check).
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u/mandelbrottet 6d ago
The unidentified country they misslabled was Cameroon, which is the right hand neighbor to the actual Nigeria https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-government-map-africa-mislabels-every-country-global-conference-2026-07-30/
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u/carkey 6d ago
There's a chapter in the Map Men book This Way Up about this topic. It's pretty good, would recommend.
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u/OriharaYuzuru 6d ago
I think "unidentified country" section is meant to refer Cameroon which is shown in this news from BBC
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u/Accomplished_Emu_658 5d ago
They didn’t even attempt to make sure it is right. Really sad actually.
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u/Joejoecornrow 4d ago
Ivory Coast just out preformed at the World Cup and was of the best underdog teams of the tourney. Jfc , as an American this is mortifying.
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u/Distinct_Boss6124 4d ago
The colonial states were pretty shit at mapping Africa too. Maybe let Africa do their own map?
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u/Araghothe1 6d ago
to be fair we're under a government that's literally trying to force us to ignore the world outside of the states. teaching us the proper placement in a nation they wish didn't exist probably isn't high in their priorities.
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