National Weather Service Reportedly Published AI-Generated Forecast Map With Fabricated Idaho Town Names

January 3, 2026

The U.S. National Weather Service office reportedly published a wind forecast map for Camas Prairie, Idaho containing falsified and misspelled place names due to an error in the AI tool used to create the base map. The faulty image, featuring non-existent towns, was shared on social media before being removed and corrected.

Leverage Project Cerebellum for responsible AI governance and safer predictions by mapping this incident using HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's Measure function. JOIN US to help establish guardrails for trustworthy AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.1 — similarity 0.664, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.3 — similarity 0.657, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.655, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: national-weather-service
Alleged developer: unknown-generative-ai-developers
Alleged harmed parties: epistemic-integrity, residents-of-camas-prairie-idaho, general-public, general-public-of-idaho

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1332

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.