The U.S. State Department Entirely Mislabelled a Map of Africa at the AIDS2026 Conference

Emily Bass: A senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa that was completely wrong before high-level officials from African nations, including some whose countries had been mislabelled. The map mishap occurred during a presentation at “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs,” a pre-conference event at the largest AIDS conference in the world, held this year in Rio de Janeiro. Just an incredibly bad use of a map in at least two ways: none of the named countries are correctly highlighted on the map, and a few of the labelling lines do not correctly correspond to the regions they are supposed to identify — which, again, are incorrect. Jessica Donati, Reuters: 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. Shocking nobody. ⌥ Permalink