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The U.S. State Department presented a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference this week in which every country was mislabelled and its borders jumbled.

The map, as first reported by Substack writer and AIDS expert Emily Bass and confirmed by Reuters, “caused a stir” when it was presented by a top official from the foreign affairs agency.

The graphic shows an outline of Africa with six areas highlighted, and lines that match the areas to the supposed country names. Next to the country names are figures indicating potential grant amounts.

But what is labelled as “Nigeria” is actually a nondescript blob that seemingly encompasses areas of Mali, Niger, and Algeria. The shape labelled “Mozambique” looks more like a portion of Ethiopia. The State Department’s version of “Côte D’Ivoire” has been moved from West Africa to East Africa, and Cameroon seemingly didn’t even get a corresponding line, though one area without a label is situated in what is actually Côte D’Ivoire.

The only two countries vaguely in the right areas are Malawi and Uganda, though the area labelled Malawi is still in the wrong area and Uganda seems to have usurped part of Kenya.

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Reuters reported that the map bears an AI watermark that signals that it was made with OpenAI. That would explain why the map’s labels and borders are so wrong, and some of the strange formatting choices,........

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