Months before it mysteriously vaporized into thin air, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ravaged the National Weather Service, leading to severe staffing shortages.
While the Trump administration promised to rehire most of the around 550 lost jobs at the agency last summer, effectively admitting that DOGE had gone too far, the agency’s offices across the country are still struggling with many roles that remain unfilled.
And given the latest blunder, those who remain are seemingly struggling to keep up — relying on flawed AI tech to come up with broken visuals for social media feeds.
As the Washington Post reports, the National Weather Service was caught posting an AI-generated weather map that hallucinated names for towns in Idaho.
A graphic forecasts “gusty south winds tonight” and shows a map that lays out the names of nonexistent towns, like “Orangeotilld” and “Whata Bod” — an unintentionally hilarious hallucination that sounds more like an old timey dirty joke than an actual place where people live.
The offending artwork was taken down on Monday, the same day WaPo notified the agency.
Experts say that the painful blunder could undercut trust in the agency and lead to confusion.
It also perfectly highlights the glaring shortcomings of AI tech that continue to lead to similar embarrassing incidents as the Trump administration pushes hard for the tech’s adoption by government agencies. Last month, for instance, it hired 1,000 specialists for a “Tech Force” to build AI.
But despite plenty of enthusiasm and resources being allocated to advancing the tech, baffling and easily avoided mistakes are falling through the cracks, as the latest incident goes to show.
It’s not even the first time a NWS office was caught posting lazy AI slop on social media. In November, the service in Rapid City, South Dakota, posted a map that included illegible location names, leading to widespread mockery.
The NWS told WaPo in a statement that using AI for public-facing content is uncommon, but technically not prohibited.
“Recently, a local office used AI to create a base map to display forecast information, however the map inadvertently displayed illegible city names,” NWS spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei told the newspaper. “The map was quickly corrected and updated social media posts were distributed.”
Cei added that “NWS will continue to carefully evaluate results in cases where AI is implemented to ensure accuracy and efficiency, and will discontinue use in scenarios where AI is not effective.”
But the damage has already been done. As flawed generative AI tools continue to be used carelessly, without the necessary follow-up work of checking for hallucinations, experts warn that agencies like NWS could inflict serious damage to their reputation and authority.
“If there’s a way to use AI to fill that gap, I’m not one to judge,” weather and climate communication expert Chris Gloninger told WaPo. “But I do fear that in the case of creating towns that don’t exist, that kind of damages or hurts the public trust that we need to keep building.”
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