This Halloween, crowds lined the streets in central Dublin and waited for a parade to begin. They’d gathered after a website called MySpiritHalloween.com published an AI-generated article promoting the festivities. The post promised “spectacular floats to thrilling street performances” and described the route in detail.
The parade never came—but the spectacle of throngs of people milling around for nothing became an event unto itself. Afterward, the incident went viral as an example of AI slop seeping into the real world.
Since the generative AI boom began, a class of SEO entrepreneurs has started pumping out AI-generated content on websites and across social platforms, in efforts to make money off online advertising and affiliate marketing. MySpiritHalloween.com owner Nazir Ali is one of them. WIRED spoke with Ali via Google Meet to get his side of the story. He insists it’s all just a big misunderstanding.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nazir Ali: Ask anything.
Kate Knibbs: Well, how are you doing?
I am actually good, but we are highly embarrassed. We are highly depressed that everyone is reporting against us. They’re calling us scammers, saying that we scammed. This was not on purpose!
Can you explain what happened?
The thing is, we are the content creators. I am the owner of a SEO agency. We make websites and we rank them on Google. We hired some content writers online, and they helped us out on all the Halloween events throughout the world: in the USA, in UK, and most importantly, Ireland. If there are any mistakes, for example you see an event and it was moved—there were some events in Dubai, but hotel management texted us and said that the event was not listed, so we removed it immediately. But no one reported that this one wasn’t going to happen. As soon as we knew, we changed it. We even wrote this has been canceled, but it was too late.
I want to ask about the AI of it all—
I’ll explain it to you. You can easily write a whole website with AI. But it is not easy to rank on Google’s first page, and our site was ranked on the first page. It was even on the first position of the first page. Okay, AI was involved. We asked ChatGPT to write the article for us, but it wasn’t ChatGPT by itself. So we took help from AI, we took help from ChatGPT, but we optimized that ourselves.
So there was a human editor?
Exactly, yes, we humanized it. Definitely. You cannot rank through AI content alone. AI was involved 10 percent or 20 percent. We were 80 percent involved. And we apologize to our Irish brothers. We are highly disappointed, highly embarrassed, and honestly, we are feeling bad.
Dubliners awaiting a Halloween parade that never showed up.
Video: Hashel Thilanka via Spectee/Reuters
How many other websites do you have?
I own five websites. And actually, I want to tell you one more thing. Are you familiar with St. Patrick’s Day?
Yes.
We wrote a lot of events this year, on the 17th of March, St. Patrick’s Day—and they were ranked. People even congratulated us. They thanked us for listing events about St Patrick’s Day. No event was reported as bogus, or AI-generated, or anything like that. We try our best to give people authentic content. We don’t actually want to mislead any of our Irish brothers. This was just a mistake. And you guys should not say that we are the scammers, unless you actually know it, unless you ask us. This is why I am here to clarify things.
I appreciate that.
We own this mistake.
So your name is Nazir Ali, but when you say “we”—
We are not going to give you any personal information that might be harmful for us. Everyone is writing about us, and they are telling us that we are scammers.
Would you be comfortable telling me about the reports that you’re based in Pakistan? Is that true?
We hire some of the content creators, and one is from Pakistan, and others are from some other countries. But I don’t want to actually reveal their nationalities. People will blame the country if I say I’m from Dubai, then whenever you write an article, if you say that a guy from Pakistan, a guy from India, guy from Ireland, a guy from the UAE, it actually hurts some of the citizens of that country.
Would you be comfortable telling me how long you’ve had this Halloween website?
You will be shocked to know that we ranked our site in three months on the Google first page.
So you’ve only been in operation for three months?
Yes.
Why holiday events?
It’s a huge topic, but only for one day. So it is easy for us to generate revenue for that one day—then we don’t have to put in effort throughout the year. We just do work for three or four months, and then we’ll get the revenue.
Could you explain more about your business model. How do you make money?
Our business model is Google Ads. Google Ads and affiliate marketing.
Has this made you reconsider the ways that you operate? Will you change how you use AI going forward?
It is our mistake. We should double check it. Not only double, but triple check it. One more thing I want to add is that people should not consider Google as the standard. Google is just a search engine, and any person can post anything on it. Don’t just believe it. Just cross check!
Are you concerned that Google will downrank you now?
Definitely. We are expecting Google will derank.
Is there anything you could try to do to prevent that?
No, there is nothing. And this is because of all the misinformation provided by the journalists. They don’t actually know what our intentions are, but they are showing that our intentions are wrong. But right now the guys are very depressed. Listen to me. If we wanted to scam people, we can easily do so by selling fake tickets. But we never mentioned any tickets on the website. That would be very simple, but we didn’t even mention the ticket thing.
Well, I’m glad you didn’t do that.
Then we would be scammers, but we don’t do it, because it is illegal and prohibited.
How much money do you make off SEO?
It is very personal, and it depends on the traffic.
Ballpark?
One more thing is that we posted around 1,400 articles. It is not easy to post 1,400 articles in three months and to make them rank in Google. This shows that this is a mistake. This is not a scam. We have other articles, we have other websites. We never had this type of issue before.
In addition to the St. Patrick’s Day websites, what are some of the other websites you’re running?
Actually, there are few others about animals. Another niche is about SEO, and how you can be an SEO expert, but I’m not going to reveal those.
OK. Is there anything else you think people have gotten wrong about you?
I just want to say that people should not judge so soon. They should go through some of the processes—they can contact me, contact our team. They should ask us questions. They can be harsh, they can be rude. But we are not wrong, and we are not scammers. That’s it.
