Two Home Affairs officials suspended after AI 'hallucinations' found

Add the insult that these two officials have no doubt been suspended on full pay and benefits while the year-long investigation takes place at great expense to the tax payer. After which they are moved to a different government department as “punishment”.

Currently it's happening in reverse in Denmark. People submit complaints to the municipalities about various things and increasingly those complaints are written with the help of AI (~20%). These cases take up a ton of time, because they are so difficult to process, referencing rules and regulations that doesn't exist, mixed in with some that do. These AI written complaints are typically way more complex, and 10 times the pages of a human written one.

I worked for a large North American telco.

New Director of core network had an all hands to introduce self and lay out some stuff. During someone’s welcome they said, seriously, in front of ~500 IT/Engineering people “wait, what is IPv6?”

Happens here all the time too.

You should have read the rest of the article - that imcident was mentioned too.

God forbid people actually have to do work and fact-check the hallucination machines!

I dont know if its "evidence of AI" so much as "Evidence of laziness causing extreme public embarrassment"

Every good AI policy is basically:

1. You may use <supported LLM with enterprise data agreement>

2. You are still responsible for the quality of your output, customer facing embarrassment is your fault and will not be attributed to the technology.

In this case, the LLM was used to generate a reference table.

>“It seems that these references were generated and attached to the document after the fact, as they are not cited in the body of the text.

Like its just a retrospective justification for the content they have written, its not lazy editing it implies a complete lack of research, while fraudulently trying to imply the research was completed.

These suspensions send the appropriate message. This isn't the same thing as poorly reviewed marketing copy, hallucinations in government policy papers are unacceptable.

> Maybe someday when there's been enough such reports people will shrug like they do about security breaches now.

Yes, it's a real danger that it becomes a whole shift downward for society. We stop objecting to errors and mediocrity because they've become so normalized.

These people are employed to serve the public and are paid by public funds. This is a socially critical job which affects people's entire lives, and in South Africa possibly their personal safety. This isn't just another coporation who needs to make line go up.

The wording of the article suggests that large parts of the documents where false and should have been caught by review, for which these two director-level people were responsible. This seems to be more than just editing which was "a bit sloppy".

I suggest if you were an immigrant whose citizenship application was denied based on an AI hallucination, forcing you to uproot and move your family out of the country against your will, you would not appreciate that and would take a different view.

Wow, way to argue maliciously.

The only reason any AI usage is rejected in this scenario is due to errors.

Human error is one thing, but if a human uses AI and does not verify its output and then publishes it as some sort of authoritative work, you are pushing deep past ethical issues and often into legal issues.

Government word is law so government employees posting bad information from AI when it's their job to post good information is practically a crime in of itself.

Yes, humans can also publish information by mistake, but there's a massive difference between a human getting some numbers wrong vs. AI completely inventing citations.

My megacorp recently published their first AI usage policy, more or less, go nuts using AI but you will be 100% be held accountable for reviewing output to be acceptable, including but not limited to terminations.

This is just one more facet of the general incompetence of South African government employees, this just hit headlines due to the novelty of it having AI as a component of said incompetence.