KPMG report on AI found riddled with AI hallucinations

If I were SkyNet, and I wanted to discredit those warning of the dangers of trusting AI, this is exactly what I would do.

I'm sure it's a coincidence, and there's nothing to be worried about.

« A new probe into Big Four KPMG's report on agentic AI found that the majority of its references were flawed, amid the latest news of AI-hallucinated reports published by professional services firms.

The investigation, conducted by GPTZero, focused on KPMG's October 2025 report, 'Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI', which summarises its annual global customer experience excellence study.

The findings revealed that, of 45 citations in the Big Four firm's flagship report, only five accurately point to real, uncorrupted sources.

GPTZero, an AI detection software, found that 40 out of 45 citation titles are fake. The Big Four firm coined the term 'vibe citing' to describe how generative AI tools accidentally create fake references, mix real sources together, or heavily paraphrase titles. »

However, it gets a bit serious:

« The AI checker's flawed statistics and claims from the KPMG report have already been recycled by industry publications and a Czech newspaper and are now being cited directly by LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini. »

Spokesperson or AI agent?

« A spokesperson for KPMG told the FT that the firm "takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously" and that it had removed the report from websites while it investigates the circumstances surrounding the report's publication. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources." »

Graeme

There's a far greater hazard than AI boosting itself:

As models are under direct control of totalitarian silos, ideology can be baked into every tendril of knowledge represented.

A service such as Gemini may be a societal ideological risk on a greater scale than the notoriously fascist influence of radio/TV in the 1920s and 30s.

"Guardrails" are direct lines of injection of ideology, and "hallucinations" can serve to mask.

Why should anyone trust singular corporate control points for doctrine on the totality of knowledge? It seems like a crazy risk.

News is already utterly polluted with doctrinaire bias.

Politics are clearly designed to keep the electorate away from decision-making, and open doors to privileged silos of control.

AI can own the populace coming and going as the models inject doctrine into the core of knowledge and scour the consumer for measures doctrinal uptake and alignment. Will information become totalized with no possibility of escape?