South Africa yanks AI policy after AI-assisted drafting invents citations

The Register — Apr 27, 19:24 ★★★★★

South Africa's draft national AI policy has been yanked after the government discovered that it cited sources invented entirely by the chatbot that drafted it.

South Africa withdrew its draft AI policy document after detecting fabricated citations; the policy had been written with AI assistance. The LLM generating the policy text hallucinated academic references to support its claims, a failure of verification that went undetected until publication review.

Sofia's take: Government uses AI to write AI policy. AI invents citations. Policy withdrawn. The irony would be funny if the failure weren't so cleanly diagnostic of what regulators are actually capable of. You cannot govern technology you don't understand.

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