PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has released reports on AI and electric vehicles that contained hallucination errors featuring fabricated citations, misattributed material and information that could not be verified, the Financial Times (FT) reported.
According to research by GPTZero, which was verified by the FT, AI hallucinations were present in “thought leadership” papers aimed at helping partners win consulting mandates in the Middle East.
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Earlier investigations by GPTZero prompted two other Big Four companies, EY and KPMG, to withdraw reports that also appeared to contain AI hallucinations.
GPTZero identified four PwC Middle East publications from the past two years whose text appeared to rely heavily on AI tools and whose references were based on weak or unreliable foundations.
The documents included a playbook for companies using “agentic” autonomous AI bots, guidance for governments on improving public services, and regional forecasts for electric and autonomous vehicles.
Researchers found that many of the citations in these reports were problematic.
Numerous links led to web pages that did not contain the evidence claimed, while some directed readers to pages that did not exist.
One academic paper on air quality in Riyadh appeared to have been entirely invented by AI, with no record of the study in the cited journal or under the names of the supposed authors.
Several other footnotes pointed to unusual sources.
PwC Middle East told the FT it “takes the accuracy of our published research seriously and is updating a limited number of supporting citations” in the reports identified by GPTZero.
The disorganised and unreliable treatment of sources across the four PwC Middle East papers was typical of AI-generated research, GPTZero researcher Paul Esau told the publication.
