Deloitte will provide a partial refund to the federal government over a 250.000 euro report that contained several errors, after admitting it used generative artificial intelligence to help produce it.
Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a 250.000 euro report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement. A new version of the report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) was quietly uploaded to the department’s website on Friday 3 October, ahead of a long weekend across much of Australia. It features more than a dozen deletions of nonexistent references and footnotes, a rewritten reference list, and corrections to multiple typographic errors.
The work, commissioned last December, involved the Targeted Compliance Framework – the government’s IT-driven system for penalizing welfare recipients who miss obligations such as job search appointments. When the report was first published in July, University of Sydney academic Dr Christopher Rudge spotted multiple fabrications, prompting Deloitte to investigate. Rudge initially suggested the errors might be the handiwork of a chatbot prone to “hallucinations,” a suspicion Deloitte declined to confirm at the time.
(Sources: Financial Times, The Guardian, The Register)
