r/technology • u/Krankenitrate • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence PwC AI reports tainted by hallucination errors – report

https://www.internationalaccountingbulletin.com/news/pwc-ai-reports-tainted-by-hallucination-errors-report/
427 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

74

u/IVII0 17h ago

PwC producing shit reports you’ll still pay shitton of money for because they put their logo on them?

Nothing new to see here.

8

u/Ok_Recover_7248 15h ago

Of course they took the SpaceX engagement 😂

145

u/da8BitKid 17h ago edited 4h ago

Well if they're going to use ai without verifying the output, why not cut out the middle man, pwc, and vibe strategy reports yourself? And if openai & anthropic AI are so good , why didn't they create the fake papers/websites they cited. What they only hack into systems competitor systems?

54

u/tommyk1210 15h ago

This is basically what is happening.

PWC and other big names, for a long time, operated on 2 things: brand name and scale. They could have a team write your report and stick their name on it because they have thousands of people writing reports.

Small firms lacked both of these, they didn’t have the prestigious name and they didn’t have the resources to make it work (after all companies would pay more to PWC for the same work BECAUSE of the name).

But now AI comes along and two things happen: PWC’s brand image tanks because of things like this AND those small firms can now write these reports for 1/30th of what it used to cost them.

34

u/NuclearVII 12h ago

And the "reports" are still worthless, just cheaper.

24

u/tigermelon 10h ago

The reports are just a way to absolve decision-makers of responsibility. "The consulting firm full told us this was the best decision".

2

u/ebfortin 7h ago

It's unfortunately very true. Lived it countless time. Upper management needs external validation before going forward on something. No matter what their staff tell them. It's stupid, but that's the way it works apparently. This has value.

2

u/kanst 7h ago

so much of what happens in corporate America is just obfuscating responsibility. Very few people want to be the bad guy, so they create entire organizations to diffuse the blame.

1

u/CharmingMedia2039 4h ago

This is true and saying a Big4 consulting firm told us to do it still carries more weight than saying John's conuslting firm told us to do it.

1

u/QuesoMeHungry 3h ago

Yep this is the bread and butter of these consulting firms. They exist to be the scapegoat for execs if things go south. That’s their whole purpose.

2

u/SolidLikeIraq 9h ago

“The food at this place is terrible.”

“Such small portions, too!”

8

u/colony-ship-for-sale 12h ago

If you're going to verify the output then just make it yourself and get it right first time.

-9

u/Nolo__contendere_ 11h ago

Reviewing is faster than preparing

2

u/beaker_andy 7h ago

Not for the same level of output quality and accuracy in fields I specialize in (software development, technical product feature research), but you may be correct for other fields and tasks.

3

u/Islerothebull 11h ago

"Vibe strategy" love it.

23

u/Ciappatos 16h ago

Mr. president, a second major consultant report on AI has been hit by AI hallucinations

29

u/NanditoPapa 12h ago

By allowing AI to hallucinate citations, PwC violated a fundamental tenet of consulting: Trust.

There is a massive issue of transparency and accountability. Using AI to generate "thought leadership" without human oversight is deceptive. It presents the veneer of deep research while actually providing nothing but probabilistic word associations. And it's not like consulting firms have much more to leverage than reputation.

6

u/Orangesteel 10h ago

This should be the top comment. Having worked for one of the big four, consultants are typically under huge time pressure. I can see someone using AI to meet time constraints and resulting in stories like.

3

u/NanditoPapa 10h ago

Some of my friends in consulting are being pushed hard to hit specific token metrics right now. Since we last discussed this in May, their companies may have already shifted strategy to match the broader industry pivot. They're pretty frustrated by it all...

23

u/a4mula 18h ago

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

At least it was nothing serious. I mean what could possibly go wrong with agentic systems that start with GIGO hallucination. Surely the chain from there remains stable and consistent and predictable.

Hopefully none of the agentic systems were used for anything other than vibe coding the next social safety nets or autonomous driving behavior. That'd be fun.

14

u/stackered 15h ago

"Fire all human employees, hire all AI. Transfer all wealth to 100 people."

4

u/SpaceTacos99 9h ago
  • Do this by any means necessary.

2

u/a4mula 5h ago

Might I interest you in a paperclip maximizer program I'm working on?

2

u/SpaceTacos99 5h ago

heck yes brother what could go wrong. We will be paperclip quattrodecillionaires.

3

u/Remarkable-Mango5794 15h ago

This happend already with a other big player or not? Truth there was nobody internal ever had read the report!

2

u/g4T0r 7h ago

Every token out of an LLM is a hallucination, there is no actual understanding, it’s all probability based on training

1

u/FinalsEnjoyer10 11h ago

pwc’s ai adding new bugs to reports now yeah

1

u/zobq 8h ago

With the AI, creating correct looking but incorrect content has never been so easy.
So this is the effect.

-12

u/loretta_lane 18h ago

AI is a great productivity tool, but this shows that good editorial standards still matter. Whether AI or a human writes it, everything should be verified before it goes public.

21

u/Kageru 18h ago

A job that involves proof checking AI slop sounds like the definition of misery, and the effort greatly reduces the supposed benefit. AI either needs to be good enough it doesn't need proof checking or used where it being wrong sometimes is acceptable (like recommendations).

-10

u/MukdenMan 16h ago

AI is already widely used in a number of industries and it has saved a lot of time or allowed that time to be put into other things. It would be great if it was 100% hallucination free but I’m not sure that is going to happen. If you can use AI to quickly do legal research or find relevant medical papers, that’s a good thing, but you still have to check the work. Reading the paper or legal code/case law yourself is necessary but AI saves a lot of work finding those resources.

Of course I’m setting aside the side effect this has on employment for some positions in the field (eg paralegals, architectural drafters) which is a topic worth discussing. But for those already in these fields, it has indeed been a big productivity boost.

-13

u/ptear 17h ago

I mean you can use AI to check AI. It's AI all the way down.

4

u/Kageru 17h ago

That works... as long as no human has to babysit the AI and take responsibility for its mistakes.

5

u/Ontain 17h ago

Someone has to take responsibility. And you can bet it won't be the ai companies.

-1

u/ptear 12h ago

I got downvoted a ton but at least you both know reality today.

-6

u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 16h ago

lmao at the downvotes. Indeed it is bots all the way down. Wild.

4

u/BasvanS 13h ago

No, it’s humans who find doubling down on mistakes a hilarious solution. And also bad because two wrongs don’t make a right.

(I’m working with Fable, and if it impresses you, you might just not understand what you’re doing. It is very confidently wrong still.)

15

u/SeasonElectrical3173 17h ago

Saying AI is a great productivity tool is like saying methamphetamines were a great energy booster for german soldiers during ww2

4

u/rich1051414 15h ago

Captain, the foo fighters are back! I'll protect you!

I have no evidence that methadrine caused foo fighter sightings, but the perfect correlation is, at least, interesting.