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Two Home Affairs officials suspended after AI 'hallucinations' found
- quantified 6mo ago[flagged]
- wewewedxfgdf 6mo agoThe entire world sells products to encourage you to do your work with AI assistance. But god forbid that there should be any evidence of that in your .....work. You'll be suspended or fired. Holy god, it looks like someone used AI and were a bit sloppy in their editing!!!! YOU'RE FIRED! Maybe someday when there's been enough such reports people will shrug like they do about security breaches now.
- cwnyth 6mo agoGod forbid people actually have to do work and fact-check the hallucination machines!
- wewewedxfgdf 6mo agoYou're correct - whether you keep your job depends on how well you conceal that you used AI.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoI don't think most people care if you used AI or not, as long as it's correct. AI or no AI, incorrect and false stuff makes people tired of you.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo agoPeople who are paying even a slight bit of attention understand and anticipate the correlation between AI and slop/hallucination. There's a reason those terms have emerged. And there aren't corresponding terms for AI success/quality.
- benjiro3000 6mo ago[dead]
- Terr_ 6mo agoYes, but at the same time: "God forbid managers and executives actually permit people enough time to do do work and fact-check the hallucination machines." Especially in contexts where they are also mandating that staff find ways to use the hallucination machines. Much like industrial accidents, some portion of blame has to go to the system, rather than any individual.
- cwnyth 6mo agoThat's not relevant to this particular case, but sure, it's hard to disagree with that general statement.
- protocolture 6mo agoI dont know if its "evidence of AI" so much as "Evidence of laziness causing extreme public embarrassment" Every good AI policy is basically: 1. You may use <supported LLM with enterprise data agreement> 2. You are still responsible for the quality of your output, customer facing embarrassment is your fault and will not be attributed to the technology. In this case, the LLM was used to generate a reference table. >“It seems that these references were generated and attached to the document after the fact, as they are not cited in the body of the text. Like its just a retrospective justification for the content they have written, its not lazy editing it implies a complete lack of research, while fraudulently trying to imply the research was completed.
- root_axis 6mo agoThese suspensions send the appropriate message. This isn't the same thing as poorly reviewed marketing copy, hallucinations in government policy papers are unacceptable.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago> Maybe someday when there's been enough such reports people will shrug like they do about security breaches now. Yes, it's a real danger that it becomes a whole shift downward for society. We stop objecting to errors and mediocrity because they've become so normalized.
- suprjami 6mo agoThese people are employed to serve the public and are paid by public funds. This is a socially critical job which affects people's entire lives, and in South Africa possibly their personal safety. This isn't just another coporation who needs to make line go up. The wording of the article suggests that large parts of the documents where false and should have been caught by review, for which these two director-level people were responsible. This seems to be more than just editing which was "a bit sloppy". I suggest if you were an immigrant whose citizenship application was denied based on an AI hallucination, forcing you to uproot and move your family out of the country against your will, you would not appreciate that and would take a different view.
- delfinom 6mo agoWow, way to argue maliciously. The only reason any AI usage is rejected in this scenario is due to errors. Human error is one thing, but if a human uses AI and does not verify its output and then publishes it as some sort of authoritative work, you are pushing deep past ethical issues and often into legal issues. Government word is law so government employees posting bad information from AI when it's their job to post good information is practically a crime in of itself. Yes, humans can also publish information by mistake, but there's a massive difference between a human getting some numbers wrong vs. AI completely inventing citations. My megacorp recently published their first AI usage policy, more or less, go nuts using AI but you will be 100% be held accountable for reviewing output to be acceptable, including but not limited to terminations.
- jonathanlydall 6mo agoThis is just one more facet of the general incompetence of South African government employees, this just hit headlines due to the novelty of it having AI as a component of said incompetence.
- antonvs 6mo ago[flagged]
- antonymoose 6mo agoWait until you find out about IBM and Fanta!
- antonvs 6mo agoYes, I'm aware. But the point is not just that some businesses survived being Nazi-friendly - Hugo Boss is another example. The point is it's more unusual that a propaganda outlet whose entire purpose was to promote an evil regime survives that regime.
- antonymoose 6mo agoIt would seem like a news paper being pro-regime is more of a survival strategy than anything else. Plenty of papers survived the Nazi era and exist today. Nothing unique to be seen in it here.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lgleason 6mo agoIf this happened in the US or Europe it would be an interesting story. In South Africa, this is just par for the course and the quality of the work may not have been any better had it been written by the current people staffing home affairs.
- stroebs 6mo agoAdd the insult that these two officials have no doubt been suspended on full pay and benefits while the year-long investigation takes place at great expense to the tax payer. After which they are moved to a different government department as “punishment”.
- miningape 6mo agoNah don't worry, I'm sure Cyril will setup a commission for this
- mrweasel 6mo agoCurrently it's happening in reverse in Denmark. People submit complaints to the municipalities about various things and increasingly those complaints are written with the help of AI (~20%). These cases take up a ton of time, because they are so difficult to process, referencing rules and regulations that doesn't exist, mixed in with some that do. These AI written complaints are typically way more complex, and 10 times the pages of a human written one.
- abyssin 6mo agoI'm tempted to say it's fair game, since complexity has often had the advantageous side effect for governing bodies to make legitimate complaints impossible to voice for normal citizens.
- aussieguy1234 6mo agoI would be totally unsurprising if corrupt politicians in developing countries start using AI extensively for basic governance. What will be interesting is to see who does a better job. Corrupt politician by themselves, or the AI they outsource their job to.
- orbital-decay 6mo agoWhy does this page want to know my precise location?
- rubenvanwyk 6mo agoNice seeing an article from SA here :) unfortunately, this surprises none of us.
- dee_s101 6mo agoThis is the tip of the iceberg. For example, the South African government included AI hallucinations in drafting its own AI policy: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/ai/644001-south-african-experts-snubbed-from-helping-with-draft-ai-policy-that-included-fake-research.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/ai/644001-south-african-exper... . Imagine the AI slop in other documents including those that are classified, financial calculations etc.
- overfeed 6mo agoYou should have read the rest of the article - that imcident was mentioned too.
- hoektoe 6mo agoSomething from my country, suprised they didn't get a promotion
- nelox 6mo ago> Moving forward, the department will also design and implement AI checks and declarations as part of its internal approval processes Read it first?
- Ozzie-D 6mo ago[flagged]
- jonathanlydall 6mo agoAs a South African, it is well known here (well, amongst the educated) that the vast majority of management level and up government positions are awarded based on who you know rather than what you know. These people who don't actually do their job properly very rarely get dismissed, at worst, and only after a public debacle, they tend to be shuffled off to some other position in a different department that they're equally unqualified for. This just one of the many, many, many, symptoms of this general problem.
- testing22321 6mo agoI worked for a large North American telco. New Director of core network had an all hands to introduce self and lay out some stuff. During someone’s welcome they said, seriously, in front of ~500 IT/Engineering people “wait, what is IPv6?” Happens here all the time too.
- forshaper 6mo agoWorked at an ISP. An executive had trouble understanding the difference between WiFi and internet.
- mothballed 6mo ago[flagged]
- Semaphor 6mo agoThere are a few non whites in SA, who wouldn't be quite welcome. But I guess that's just *muh racism*
- jaapz 6mo agoYou are asking why people aren't flocking to a town literally founded for white separatists to live in segregated?
- mothballed 6mo ago
- scuff3d 6mo ago"Hey use our thing! It's totally going to replace all humans! It's so awesome it can do your job for you! ... BTW, it hallucinates... Like all the time.. and if you don't fact check our product you're responsible. Not us! We stole all your data to train it, we're making billions and billions of dollars off that theft, but you own all the liability"