Description: South Africa's Draft National AI Policy, gazetted for public comment, reportedly contained at least six fictitious academic references. Several cited articles or journals reportedly did not exist or were disclaimed by journal editors, and experts said the errors were consistent with AI hallucinations. The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies said it was reviewing the discrepancies but argued they did not affect the draft's substance.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown generative AI developers and Unknown large language model developers developed an AI system deployed by Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (South Africa) and Government of South Africa, which harmed Epistemic integrity , General public , General public of South Africa and AI policy stakeholders.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown generative AI systems and Large language models
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1467
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2026-04-10
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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The national policy document intended to shape South Africa's approach to artificial intelligence (AI) may have fallen victim to one of its most widely understood pitfalls.
News24 can exclusively reveal that some of the academic journal art…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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