US State Department map used at international AIDS conference mislabeled every African nations
Isn't geography something the State Department should know?
Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams
Those were just some of the responses to Thursday reporting on a US Department of State map presented at
a global conference in Brazil that
mislabeled every African country it included.
“Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the
AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed
halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements,” the news agency reported.
“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 outlet noted. “The
company said it was investigating the report.”
While Jeff Graham, who oversees the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and was speaking at the conference, did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, the State Department said that “we take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.”
Critics around the world, including Democrats in Congress,
blasted the department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio and
President Donald
Trump, who have reduced staff by 3,000 between layoffs and voluntary
departures.
A recent Financial Times article headlined “RIP the US State Department”
noted that “as of late June more than half of American ambassadorships were
vacant, including high-status posts from Germany to Saudi Arabia,” and
nearly 80% of American embassies across Africa lack an
ambassador.
Sharing the Reuters reporting on social media Thursday,
Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy
program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, commented,
“Checking in on the whole defund the State Department thing.”
Former US Ambassador
to Jamaica Luis Moreno said that
“this is the pathetic result when you fire career, nonpartisan diplomatic
personnel and replace them with unqualified partisan hacks who rely on faulty
AI.”
US
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen
(D-NH) declared: “What an embarrassment. This is what happens when
the US Department of State fires career experts and tries to have AI conduct
diplomacy.”
Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) stressed that
“Trump’s Department of State showed up to a global conference with an
AI-generated map that mislabeled nations across Africa. Every. Single. One.
This isn’t just an embarrassing mistake.”
“It’s a symbol of an administration that has treated a
continent of 1.5 billion people as an afterthought while China is deepening
engagement across the African continent,” he argued. “That’s what happens when
you hollow out expertise and stop taking diplomacy seriously. Our African
partners and the American people deserve better.”
