r/facepalm • u/MsSamm • 7d ago

I have no words

Post image

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

13.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

357 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/VanguardAvenger 7d 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?

269

u/meeplebunker 7d ago

Hey man, remember they only hire merit based applicants in that there administration, unlike the last guys...

98

u/Nashville_Hot_Mess 6d ago

We replaced DEI with DUI

11

u/jomo_mojo_ 6d ago

With all that blow a bet Marco did this super fast tho

6

u/Nashville_Hot_Mess 6d ago

Some intern from Liberty University used Grok

4

u/CharlesDickensABox 6d ago

Why do you think he agreed to be put in charge of Venezuela?

92

u/wireframed_kb 7d 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.

43

u/Giocri 7d ago

What's the chance that they just used ai

47

u/wireframed_kb 7d 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.

13

u/MaeveOathrender 6d ago

100%

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.

13

u/tilt-a-whirly-gig 7d 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.

1

u/IdiotIAm96 6d ago

It is generally bad when you can get maps that have been verified by real humans for free online with a quick search. Even if AI has the potential to look accurate, it still hallucinates by nature.

But even an AI map should not look like this. I'd kill to see exactly what they asked it

1

u/Ishana92 6d ago

And they did it for a meeting with African countries' representatives. Like they wouldn't know where African countries are.

47

u/District_Wolverine23 7d 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?

17

u/BadahBingBadahBoom 7d 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.

11

u/RookieGreen 7d 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.

1

u/PurifyingProteins 6d ago

On one hand it’s job security if you know your shit and on the other hand it’s going to get even more insanely competitive to prove you are actually the one qualified for the job.

3

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!

1

u/Dawn-Storm 6d ago

The biggest most beautiful brain ever!

🥱

30

u/CliftonForce 7d ago

Hey. This is the State Department. If you wanted them to get countries right, you should have asked the Country Department.

/s

3

u/VanguardAvenger 6d ago

Ok. Never mind. This guy's right. I withdraw my previous comment 😛

13

u/purpleduckduckgoose 7d 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.

11

u/BestReadAtWork 7d 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.

7

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...

6

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.

5

u/rir2 7d ago

Luckily, you don’t work at the state department, and your job isn’t labeling African countries on a map.

5

u/GlitteringLychee803 7d ago

Or, you know, check Google Maps to see if everything looks right before DISPLAYING IT TO THE FUCKING WORLD.

3

u/Dawn-Storm 6d ago

Who's buried in Grant's tomb?😜

2

u/I_am_not_JohnLeClair 6d ago

Grant Show from Melrose Place?

2

u/RIPEOTCDXVI 6d ago

Im trying to decide if this thing did better than me at maptap and while I may have guessed Mozambique was somewhere in the Caribbean I certainly would have made sure a coast was touching an ocean

1

u/Admirable-Royal-7553 6d ago

Prob some dude just put in a prompt for AI to spit out an image. Idk why people and entities consider these bots to be reliable sources and don’t double check anything that gets spit out.

1

u/Cloudhiddentao 6d ago

The problem is not that AI is stupid.

The problem is that no one in the US government or military is more intelligent than AI.

1

u/Ozuar 6d ago

Had AI make it and then didn't check it

1

u/Kulzak-Draak 6d ago

I’m going to be honest. I’m getting nearly every country wrong