Most people have an abysmal level of knowledge of world geography, unable to place even major countries on a map of the world. I recall when I first came to the US as a graduate student, friendly people would ask me where I was from. When I said Sri Lanka, I would often get blank looks. That was not a surprise since Sri Lanka is a small country that is not a global player, and it had changed its name from Ceylon only four years earlier. So when people followed up by asking me where it was located, I would say that it was a small island off the southern coast of India and that was usually sufficient for them to place it. But I recall once a woman responding, “Oh, so you’re from South America!”
Jon Stewart has joked that wars are America’s way of learning geography since it is only when the US starts a war with some country that people learn about that region of the world. So it was no surprise to learn that at a global conference on AIDS held in Brazil last week, a presentation by US officials that had a map of Africa had every single country mislabeled.
A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
…The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
It should be no surprise that the US government officials had used AI to create this map.
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.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
…Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
In a statement, the state department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The speaker at the conference was Jeff Graham, the top US health envoy who oversees the initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. He did not reply to requests for comment.
That the speaker and his aides could not identify the location of all the countries on the map is not a surprise nor is it that reprehensible, unless they purported to be specialists on Africa, since there are 54 countries on that continent. Unless one has a specific reason to know where a country is (say by having traveled to it or having some other connection), one can be excused for not knowing its precise location since it is a bit of trivia that is not that important to immediately recall. It is akin to being unable to identify random states on a map of the US, which even many Americans cannot do. That these AI systems can make egregious errors is also not really a surprise. These kinds of ‘AI hallucinations’, as they are called, are well known by now.
What is surprising is that given the awareness of both those factors, no one thought to check the AI output against a real map before presenting it to the public. One would think that that would be a minimum checking procedure.
But this is the Trump administration, where ignorance reigns supreme, and diligence and care and expertise are devalued.
All of the “smart” people in Rubio’s State Dept now work on taking, concealing, and laundering oil money from Venezuela.
Maybe a few of them get to plan how to make Gaza the Riviera of the eastern Med.
Some fun ways to learn geography trivia: https://www.flagle.io (You have 6 guesses to figure out a country based on parts of its flag and distance+direction from previous guesses) and https://worldle.com (guessing a country based on the outline of its map and distance+direction from previous guesses).
“That the speaker and his aides could not identify the location of all the countries on the map is not a surprise nor is it that reprehensible, unless they purported to be specialists on Africa, since there are 54 countries on that continent. Unless one has a specific reason to know where a country is (say by having traveled to it or having some other connection), one can be excused for not knowing its precise location since it is a bit of trivia that is not that important to immediately recall. It is akin to being unable to identify random states on a map of the US, which even many Americans cannot do.”
I don’t think being able to find all the countries of Africa should require one to be a specialist on Africa. (I’ve just checked in Wikipedia, and I got Benin and Togo the right way round, which I think is the hardest bit*.) Merely working in International Relations (i.e. in a non-clerical, non-janitorial, role in the State Department) ought to be sufficient. Moreover one doesn’t need to be able to locate all African countries to be able to tell that this map is nonsense (Malawi and Uganda are in roughly the right place, but with the wrong shapes; the other 4 countries are worse.)The person making the presentation is a career diplomat who is currently Acting Global AIDS Coordinator -- he should know better. I can only hope that he didn’t check the slide stack before the presentation.
*I’d start failing on the nations of Micronesia and Polynesia.
One giveaway might be that a country called Côte d’Ivoire is unlikely to be landlocked. Oh. wait a minute, French.
How did AI screw up that bad? There are thousands of accurate maps of Africa on the web. What source did AI use?
Either Trump’s sons made the map, or we do not have to worry about an AI/ robot uprising for a very long time.
Maybe the terrorist David Hearn vandalised the map like he did the reflecting pool? Oh wait, Trump’s prosecutor now says those charges were a boo-boo, surely not?
@ 5 larpar
It appears it’s not designed to be accurate, it’s designed to appear plausible. At least that’s my experience with “AI”.
It’s a bit like props in a movie. They need to look real. No need whatsoever to actually work. That’s also true of the output of “AI” in my experience. It’s a simulation machine.
@ ^
The problem is many think the “I” is to be taken literally and it can be trusted as an authority. That’s quite disturbing.
@6: Given their history of big game hunting, they might well have a better knowledge of African geography than whoever created that map.
So, the speaker being Jeff Graham…
….is not enough of “some other connection” to warrant thorough knowledge of the subject matter in a presentation at a global conference on AIDS, the very subject of the program that said speaker at the conference oversees?
Really?