{"text":[[{"start":7.95,"text":"EY has withdrawn a study on loyalty rewards programmes that included apparent AI hallucinations and fake footnotes, in the latest example of a professional services firm being led astray by the new technology."}],[{"start":21.5,"text":"The study, which was used by EY consultants in Canada to market their cyber security business, used made-up data, mis-attributed citations and referenced a McKinsey report that does not exist, online researchers discovered."}],[{"start":35.95,"text":"EY Canada removed the study, “Points of Attack: Uncovering Cyber Threats and Fraud in Loyalty Systems”, from its website after the hallucinations were reported by the research group GPTZero late on Thursday."}],[{"start":48.45,"text":"The researchers showed the report relied on erroneous or inconsistent data to make its case that loyalty schemes are vulnerable to fraud. At different points in the report, the size of the loyalty scheme market was estimated at $200bn and the number of unclaimed loyalty scheme points was put at exactly the same size."}],[{"start":68.35,"text":"More than half a dozen of the footnotes in EY’s report directed to web pages that did not exist or did not contain the information cited, GPTZero also found."}],[{"start":79.5,"text":"“Publishing a report online is essentially a form of data injection into the pool of knowledge that is the internet,” GPTZero researchers Om Ogale, Paul Esau and Alex Cui wrote in a blog post."}],[{"start":92,"text":"“When the report includes fake information (either vibed citations or false claims) it can ‘poison the well’ by misleading future researchers, especially if the report is published by a well-known consulting firm and hosted on a high-traffic website.”"}],[{"start":106.6,"text":"Hallucinations have been a recurring problem across the professional services. EY’s Big Four rival Deloitte had to revise a report for a Canadian provincial government last year after it was revealed it contained fake academic citations."}],[{"start":120.75,"text":"And last month, the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell apologised to a New York court because a filing in a high-profile case repeatedly misquoted the US bankruptcy code and cited cases incorrectly."}],[{"start":132.1,"text":"But consulting firms are determined adopters of AI, investing heavily in the technology, training staff to use it and promoting their implementation services to clients."}],[{"start":142.9,"text":"EY claimed in October that its AI-related revenue had grown 30 per cent in the previous year and 15,000 staff had worked on client projects “ranging from delivering enterprise-wide transformations to AI governance frameworks that help drive the responsible implementation of AI”."}],[{"start":161.5,"text":"EY said it had removed the loyalty scheme report from its website and was “reviewing the circumstances that led to this article’s publication”, adding the study was not connected to work for any EY client."}],[{"start":174,"text":"“EY Canada takes the accuracy of all the content we publish seriously and we have an organisation-wide commitment to the responsible use of AI,” EY said."}],[{"start":191.10000000000002,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778885915_9737.mp3"}