The parade was advertised by My Spirit Halloween and attracted thousands of Dublin residents to gather along a route from Parnell Square to Temple Bar for an event purportedly organized by Galway arts ensemble Macnas . Only after Halloween fans arrived did it become clear that the website had completely invented the parade.

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My Spirit Halloween is a Pakistan-hosted website that creates AI-generated news. When the website produced the fictitious parade, it found its way through search engine optimization (SEO) onto several news and social media sites, spreading the fake news.

Many people came in disguise to take advantage of this non-event and the Gardaí, the Irish police, had to disperse the gathering.

“Please note that contrary to reports circulating online, there are no Halloween parades planned in Dublin city center this evening or tonight,” the official Gardaí social media account posted last night.

“All those who have gathered on O’Connell Street in anticipation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. THANKS.”

The crowds were so large that the Luas tram network which runs through Dublin city center was disrupted on two lines, putting the red and green lines out of service for half an hour.

Although this was widely seen as an amusing incident by the many Irish Halloween fans fooled into believing the fictitious parade, it is an alarming demonstration of the power of misinformation.

There has been no public suggestion that the My Spirit Halloween site was acting with malicious intent. Nonetheless, the possibility of AI-generated fiction being posted online as fact and then touted on the Internet to influence the public is concerning.

The My Spirit Halloween website, hosted in Pakistan but claiming to be based in Illinois, posted the information early on the morning of October 31, saying the parade would begin at 7 p.m. At no point did the website imply that it was gathering AI-based information, or that the event was not real.

This would have gone largely unnoticed if the “news” of the parade had not been picked up by TikTok users who posted about the fake event and spread awareness about it.

Provoking a gathering of thousands of people in a major city center a few hours in advance is proof of the enormous influence that social media can have on the public. The fact that this information comes from a fully automated fake news source should raise alarm bells with authorities about the potential for malicious actors to take advantage of the power of online disinformation.