National Weather Service Uses AI to Generate Forecasts, Accidentally Hallucinates Town With Dirty Joke Name
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 …

