A Canadian government-commissioned Deloitte healthcare report that cost one province nearly $1.6 million contains potentially AI-generated errors, marking the second country this year to fall victim to the consulting firm’s fact-checking shortcomings.
TL;DR
- Deloitte's $1.6 million Canadian healthcare report contains AI-generated errors and fabricated citations.
- The report, commissioned by Newfoundland and Labrador, offered guidance on healthcare issues.
- Deloitte claims AI was used for research citations, not report writing, and is correcting errors.
- This follows a similar incident with a Deloitte report for the Australian government.
Mistakes—identified in a investigation released on Saturday by The Independent, a left-leaning Canadian news organization that reports on the nation's easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador—are present in a 526-page report that was distributed by its administration in May.
The assessment offered guidance to the Liberal administration's Department of Health and Community Services concerning matters such as remote medical services, incentives for keeping staff, and the consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak on medical professionals, all during a period when the region's medical industry is grappling with a deficit of nurses and physicians.
The Deloitte report featured inaccurate references, fabricated academic articles to support its cost-effectiveness findings, and attributed work to actual researchers on studies they hadn't participated in, The Independent discovered. The report even listed nonexistent papers with co-authors who stated they had no collaborative history.
“Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report,” a Deloitte Canada spokesperson told Coins2Day in a statement. “We are revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings. AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations.”
The extensive document also referenced a scholarly article from The Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy, which couldn't be located when checking its records.
“It sounds like if you’re coming up with things like this, they may be pretty heavily using AI to generate work,” Gail Tomblin Murphy, an adjunct professor in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told The Independent. Tomblin Murphy was cited by Deloitte in an academic paper that “does not exist.” She added that she had only worked with three of the six other authors named in the false citation.
“And I definitely think that there’s many challenges with that. We have to be very careful to make sure that the evidence that’s informing reports [is] the best evidence, that it’s validated evidence. And that, at the end of the day, these reports—not just because they cost governments and they cost the public—[are] accurate and evidence-informed and helpful to move things forward.”
As of Monday, the report remains on the Canadian government’s website.
The Canadian administration disbursed just under $1.6 million for the document, with payments made in eight separate distributions, as revealed through a freedom of information inquiry featured in a blog entry last Wednesday.
Tony Wakeham, head of the Progressive Conservative Party within the province and the province's incoming premier, took his oath of office in late October. The premier's office of Newfoundland and Labrador, along with the province's Department of Health and Community Services, offered no immediate reply to Coins2Day's inquiry for remarks regarding the May report and has not yet publicly discussed the matter.
This disclosure follows reports last month that Deloitte leveraged AI in a $290,000 report was released in July to assist the Australian administration in curbing welfare. However, an investigator identified inaccuracies in the 237-page report, which contained citations of nonexistent scholarly articles and a manufactured statement from a federal court ruling.
The updated research, which was discreetly posted on the Australian government's online portal, revealed that the advisory company had employed the generative AI language platform, Azure OpenAI, to assist in producing the document.
“The updates made in no way impact or affect the substantive content, findings and recommendations in the report,” Deloitte wrote in a section in the updated study.
The Australian branch of Deloitte was instructed to reimburse the government for a portion of the report's cost. As of now, no details have been disclosed concerning a possible reimbursement for The Canadian report.