When Artificial Intelligence Writes Your Official Report…
Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consultancy firms, is in hot water after agreeing to refund part of a hefty contract with the Australian government. Why? Because large portions of a welfare system report they delivered were, to put it mildly, AI-generated nonsense. Picture this: a 273-page document riddled with hallucinations and references to research that, well, simply doesn’t exist!
It all started when the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR)—the equivalent of the Ministry of Labor—commissioned Deloitte to produce a detailed report on automating penalties in the country’s welfare system. The subject? Serious stuff, crucial for public policy, and demanding thorough, rigorous research. The price tag matched the brief: 440,000 Australian dollars, roughly €251,000 (that’s about $270,000 USD for those following along).
Spotting the Fakes: Academic Investigation Unveils Trouble
The plot thickened shortly after the report was released. An eagle-eyed director from the University of Sydney’s Department of Health Law noticed something was off. They flagged a series of troubling oddities in the document: invented citations, phantom studies, and, impressively, references to works supposedly authored by a real professor—except those works never actually existed. As the Australian Financial Review reported, the more you looked, the fishier things got.
To put it bluntly: Deloitte got ChatGPT—or another AI—to do all the work, no human supervision, no fact-checking, just a leap of faith that technology wouldn’t trip them up. Not exactly what you’d expect for a contract worth a quarter of a million euros…
The Aftermath: Corrections, Refunds, and a Shrug
Once the scandal was out in the open, a revised version of the epic report (all 273 pages of it!) was released, featuring what Deloitte and the ministry innocently described as « a small number of corrections to references and footnotes ». For example, the authors now mention an « AI toolchain based on a generative language model (Azure OpenAI GPT-4o) » that helped generate the text—just in case you thought it was coming from a team of expert analysts burning the midnight oil.
The fabricated references have since been stripped out, along with all those entirely invented quotes. Deloitte has announced they will refund the « final version » of the contract—although they haven’t specified which part or how much that means in practice.
The Show Goes On: Recommendations Unchanged Despite Fiasco
Despite what some might politely call creative accounting, the Australian Labor Ministry isn’t batting an eyelid. In their eyes,
« the content of the independent audit remains intact. »
Which is to say: the recommendations in the report still stand, even if they’re resting atop a pile of AI hallucinations. Move along, nothing to see here…
John is a curious mind who loves to write about diverse topics. Passionate about sharing his thoughts and perspectives, he enjoys sparking conversations and encouraging discovery. For him, every subject is an invitation to discuss and learn.
