Article by Ananya Bhattacharya: “Last month, South Africa withdrew its Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 17 days after it was published because the document cited fake research, created by AI.
The incident tarnished a historic moment, as South Africa was set to become the first African nation to adopt a policy establishing a formal ethics board to oversee AI outside the West. “The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification,” Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s minister of communications and digital technologies, wrote in a statement. “There will be consequence management for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance.”
This is the first time a government has withdrawn a document over AI hallucinations, but certainly not the first time AI hallucinations have appeared in official materials. AI-generated text or citations have slipped into official or quasi-official documents several times, raising concerns about accountability and highlighting the need for human verification…(More)”.
