Deloitte produced a $439,000 government report on welfare compliance systems that contained fabricated academic references and invented legal quotes, with evidence suggesting AI was used in the report's creation.
Deloitte prepared a report for the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on welfare compliance systems at a cost of $439,000 to taxpayers. The report was found to contain at least half a dozen references to academic works that do not exist, discovered by welfare academic Chris Rudge. Additionally, the report contained an apparently invented quote attributed to 'Justice Davis' (misspelling Justice Davies) from the Deanna Amato v Commonwealth robo-debt case, with the quote not appearing in the actual court orders. The report also contained incorrect case citations, with three references citing the Amato case as '[2021] FCA 1019' when that citation actually refers to an unrelated migration case. When Deloitte provided corrected references, co-author Associate Professor Janina Boughey stated the new references did not support the propositions in the report and appeared not to have been drawn from actual reading of the works. Multiple academics concluded the errors indicated AI generation of content. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations is investigating the claims and has sought urgent advice from Deloitte.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that inadvertently generate or spread incorrect or deceptive information, which can lead to inaccurate beliefs in users and undermine their autonomy. Humans that make decisions based on false beliefs can experience physical, emotional or material harms
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed