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Facepalm: PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world's four largest accounting firms alongside EY, KPMG, and Deloitte, has landed in hot water after it was found to have published at least four reports riddled with AI hallucinations, fabricated citations, and fake footnotes. The reports were issued by PwC Middle East between 2024 and 2026 and were flagged as AI-generated by GPTZero, an AI detector and plagiarism checker.
The AI hallucinations were confirmed by multiple leading publications, including the Financial Times. The so-called "Thought Leadership" reports were intended to articulate PwC's insights into some of the fastest-growing businesses in the Middle East, including agentic AI, public services, and electric vehicles. However, the bizarre turn of events suggests that the reports themselves were AI-generated.
One of the contentious reports claimed that an internal PwC survey found that nearly 70% of CEOs in the region believed generative AI would redefine their business landscape in the near future. However, a footnote in the document linked to an article that did not cite any such survey.
