“Citations appear to be AI hallucinated, rather than being based on real sources”
Last December, Australia’s social media ban was a pretty wild experiment to combat teen overuse of its platforms.
However, it seems a report that helped underpin the ban has seen the overuse of AI.
A $3.48 million trial testing age-verification technology for the ban has now come under fire after several citation errors were discovered.
The report was produced by the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), which tested technologies that could potentially be used by social media platforms to check whether users are old enough to be online.
The report was praised by Communications Minister Anika Wells for showing “many effective options” for checking people’s ages.
The report’s praise was also what helped usher the ban to come into effect in the first place.
But one section titled ‘emerging technologies’ has raised some eyebrows.
An investigation by The Guardian found six references containing errors, including links to papers that don’t exist, links pointing to completely different research and author details that don’t match any known publications.
ACCS initially denied using AI to generate the report, but later admitted to using ChatGPT for several rewrites to make some paragraphs more succinct..
The organisation maintains that AI wasn’t used to generate the research or citations, claiming every source was checked by a human.
That claim wasn’t enough, because the government is now investigating the concerns.
Officials told a Senate inquiry that ACCS blamed some errors on links breaking after publication, but experts say that excuse doesn’t exactly solve the problem.
An ANU professor warned that false citations in government reports could lead to bad decisions and “erode public confidence and trust”.
A majority of the population would agree that the social media ban was the right move to make, but if any important decision is backed by nonexistent citations or even AI, alarm bells start to ring.
What’s stopping this problem from reaching other government decisions?
