Apr 30, 2026Confirmed
South Africa Home Affairs white paper carried fictitious references believed to be AI-generated; two officials suspended
AI loose in the worldMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
South Africa's Department of Home Affairs reportedly appended apparent AI-generated fictitious references to its Cabinet-approved Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection. The department withdrew the list, suspended two senior officials and commissioned an independent review. It said the paper's policy positions were unaffected.
What this means for youGovernment documents can contain made-up sources when AI is used without checking. Agencies and businesses that use AI to draft documents need a person to verify every reference before publishing.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1548
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2284. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify