Artificial Intelligence can do a lot. But nobody – at least not the partygoers in Dublin, Ireland – realised that it would pull out a party trick on Halloween this year. Dublin residents hit the streets in anticipation of a Halloween carnival full of wonky costumes and trick-or-treat shenanigans, but there was no parade.

It all started with an AI-generated “MySpiritHalloween.com” website that published details of a Macnas Halloween Parade event, asking Dublin city residents to join in from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. during Halloween week. What happened next left a lot of the people on the streets and on the internet confused. As reported by Vice, thousands lined the streets of Dublin but were left bemused by the absence of a parade.

People waiting for a halloween parade. #Dublin

No Gardai around, no official announcement, people waiting on the wrong side of the road…

Someone did pull a big #hoax#Prankpic.twitter.com/zTQUShZrya

— Artur Martins (@arturmartins) October 31, 2024

The city police had to come into action to clear the streets, according to netizens who posted about the downer on TikTok. The city police, also known as Gardai in Ireland, took to X (formerly twitter) to inform the citizens that there was no real parade scheduled and asked the people to clear the streets safely.

It was later found out that the website that ran the article with the event details was allegedly an SEO company based in Pakistan that had done so for ad revenues. In an Interview with Vice, the owner of the website, Nazir Ali, insisted that the whole debacle was a “big misunderstanding.”

Ali explained that he runs an SEO company that ranks articles on Google for ad revenues. He suggested that the website was an honest work of humans and AI was used only for “10 per cent” of the work, insisting that fully AI-generated content does not get ranked so high on Google. “We asked ChatGPT to write the article for us, but it wasn’t ChatGPT by itself. So, we took help from AI, we took help from ChatGPT, but we optimised that ourselves.”

Whatever the case might be, it was a big no-show downer for Dublin party enthusiasts. Next time you plan to go to a party that was posted online, Think twice! AI might just be playing “Trick or Treat” with only tricks up its sleeve.