Oops! Deloitte Delivers Report Full Of AI-Generated Errors To Australian Government

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Deloitte Australia will partially refund 440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000) paid by the Australian government for a report that exposed created by artificial intelligence Errors including a fabricated quote from a federal court decision and references to non-existent academic research papers.

The financial services firm’s report to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was first published on the department’s website in July. A revised version was published on Friday after University of Sydney health and welfare law researcher Chris Rudge warned the media that the report was “full of made-up references”.

Deloitte reviewed the 237-page report and “confirmed that some footnotes and references were incorrect,” the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Deloitte had agreed to repay the last installment under its contract,” the ministry said. Once the refund is made, the amount will be made public.

Asked to comment on the report’s inaccuracies, Deloitte told the Associated Press that “the matter has been resolved directly with the client.”

Deloitte did not respond when asked whether the errors were created by artificial intelligence.

The tendency of generative artificial intelligence systems to produce knowledge is called: hallucination.

The report reviewed the use of automated penalties by departmental IT systems in Australia’s welfare system. The ministry said the “substance” of the report was maintained and there were no changes to its recommendations.

The revised version included a statement that Azure OpenAI, a generative AI language system, was used to write the report.

Quotations attributed to a federal court judge were also removed, as were references to nonexistent reports attributed to legal and software engineering experts.

Rudge said he found up to 20 errors in the first version of the report.

The first mistake that occurred to her was that Lisa Burton Crawford, a professor of public and constitutional law at the University of Sydney, had written a non-existent book with a title that suggested it was outside her area of ​​expertise.

“I knew instantly that he was either hallucinated by the AI ​​or he was the world’s best kept secret because I had never heard of the book and it sounded implausible,” Rudge said.

Rudge said his academic colleagues’ work was used but not read by the report’s authors as a “show of legitimacy”, adding that he thought it was a more serious mistake to misquote a judge in a report that effectively oversees the department’s legal compliance.

“They completely misquoted a case, then quoted a judge, and I thought, wait: this is actually a bit bigger than the egos of academics. This is about misrepresenting the law in a report that they relied on to the Australian government. So I thought it was important to be diligent,” Rudge said.

Senator Barbara Pocock, public sector spokeswoman for the Australian Green party, said Deloitte should refund the full AU$440,000 ($290,000).

“Deloitte misused AI and used it in a very inappropriate way: misquoted a judge, used non-existent references,” Pocock told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.