A KPMG report on AI in business contained fabricated case studies. "Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI" made false claims about AI use at UBS, the UK's NHS, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London. GPTZero uncovered the errors; the Financial Times verified them. All named organizations disputed the claims.
GPTZero CEO Edward Tian warns that flawed reports from major consulting firms spread "secondary hallucinations," since these reports are considered highly credible and get recycled by both AI systems and people alike.
GPTZero also flagged sloppy sourcing, which may well be the root cause of the debacle: careless use of AI search. Citations are mostly loose paraphrases of real sources, often missing URLs or correct authors. In some cases, no matching original existed at all. GPTZero calls this "vibe citing," a problem that also plagues Google's AI Overviews, which a German court recently ruled Google liable for.
KPMG has pulled the report from several websites. The incident is doubly embarrassing for KPMG: the firm spread misinformation and showed it can't handle the very thing it's trying to sell its clients.
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