The AI dashboard shows frigates gathering around Cyprus and military aircraft flying towards the Gulf, where a breaking news pin alerts users to unconfirmed reports of a drone attack in Dubai.
At that precise moment on Friday, more than 3,200 people had their eyes glued to “Situation Monitoring,” which tracks everything from the location of world leaders to Internet outages.
It is one of several free sites that use artificial intelligence to process data into interactive world maps that are rich in information but not always reliable.
Interest in these tools has increased since conflict broke out in the Middle East, along with memes that gently poke fun at the type of people looking for a movie-like control center experience.
“I think it’s human psychology: They feel like they have God’s opinion or something,” said Elie Habib, creator of the artificial intelligence panel “World Monitor.”
Habib, CEO of Middle Eastern music streaming platform Anghami, said AFP “World Monitor” has had 4.4 million views since he created it in January.
“I just want to understand what’s going on in the world,” said the 53-year-old Dubai-based man, who originally conceived his tool as a “Bloomberg Terminal for geopolitics.”
Even though the war has generated a surge in interest, Habib said he has not placed ads on the site because he does not want to profit from the conflict.
“World Monitor” displays more than 450 data sources on a packed, customizable display that includes live webcams from strategic global locations and AI-curated headlines from real news outlets.
Among a constellation of options on their map, users can see where protests, GPS jamming, and earthquakes are occurring in real time.
Habib said he was “trying to move to the next step, which is extracting the signals from the noise. Otherwise, to me, it’s just too much noise.”
“It’s not just visual appeal”
Habib, a trained engineer based in Dubai, used artificial intelligence to “vibe code” his website over a weekend, a task he says would have taken him at least a year if he had written the computer script by hand.
The inner workings of “World Monitor” are open source, so other programmers have made adjustments and suggestions that Habib has since incorporated.
Sites like “World Monitor” and “Monitor the Situation,” co-created by a staffer at U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have many eye-catching features, but experts said users should not treat all their ideas as credible.
“They are not mere eye candy… but they are not drivers of truth either,” said Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research. AFP.
“The risk of hallucination is real” when an AI model is tasked with determining the meaning of information or causal links, he said.
Despite the risk of fake data, these AI panels “fill a very modern psychological need,” Sun said.
“In a crisis, people want speed, synthesis and a sense of control when headlines are fragmented and overwhelming.”
Some of the sites have chat rooms for users to interact, said Sun Sun Lim, professor of communication and technology at Singapore Management University.
This is “especially attractive during the development of events,” he said.
“Interest in global events has also been fueled by the rise of prediction markets where people have been placing bets on events” from national elections to whether Iran’s supreme leader would be overthrown, Lim said. Live streams of these bets sometimes appear on AI dashboards.
So should news wires like AFP either Reuters Are you worried about people turning to those sites for updates on the world situation?
“They should be a little worried, but not existentially,” said Counterpoint’s Sun.
“In my opinion, the real disruption is not coming from AI panels replacing these newswires, but from how it pushes them to a higher level, to become the most trusted validators and explainers.”
