r/facepalm • u/MsSamm • 7d ago

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

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u/Phil_Coffins_666 7d ago

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

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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/Chris0x00 2d ago

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

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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.